The Last Harvard: Recap

So let’s sum it all up.

Apart from some of the inherent problems with various events, which are not the tournament’s own fault, discussion of the Harvard tournament inevitably settles on its flaws and faults, not on its strengths.   The strengths are the strengths of the community; the sense of seeing a large gathering of forensicators in one place at the same time.   I didn’t actually get to see even half the folks I wanted to share a meal with going into the weekend, and yet my weekend was still relatively full.

The tournament staff itself is cut off.   I can sort of blame the tournament staff for it, even though it’s not really a failure of intent; they do try to ferret out advice and feedback.   However, they’re simply not part of our community.   The directors and staff have their own tournaments every other weekend of the year.   They go to exactly one high school tournament, and that’s their own.   No amount of soliciting feedback and advice is going to make up for that, especially since coaches and people are lazy and most won’t bother to commit their thoughts and ideas to email or paper.     Even when they do, the directors are left not really knowing whose feedback and advice to follow.

The crucial advantage to the college tournaments I help run is not so much me, as the fact that many other coaches are stupid gracious enough to help me run them.   I provide continuity and the portal in; but the posse I belong to matters most.   Each of the four college tournaments has many experienced tabbers who hail from multiple states; thus at Yale you have folks who collectively run about 150 other tab rooms during the course of a school year, and thus have access to all the lessons and experience that carries.   The college hosts have a chorus of ideas, a parliament of sorts, who can help them sort out the spurious complaints from the real, the good ideas from the failed.

The Harvard staff have one over the other colleges, in that they’re grownups, who come back year after year the way I do.   So that helps, but it’s not a total solution.   Their links to the community are weak, and so they’ve failed to adapt to a lot of best practices for simple lack of seeing them in action elsewhere, and refining them week after week the way our posse does.   And at a certain point I have to stop apologizing for people who are making a quarter million dollars off the community, and still don’t provide enough food in the judges’ lounges; our PF judge almost starved on Saturday evening as a result.

So the answer is to go elsewhere.   Since there aren’t many tournaments that weekend, I may as well put one of my own there.   UPenn has been squeezed out of a clear date in October by the calendar again.   They have to compete against someone, and I’d rather compete against another college tournament than a high school hosted affair.   Of the 130 schools that attend Yale, a good 60 or so do not go to Harvard.   Lots of folks I know stay home rather than go to a tournament at all.

So we’re going throw ourselves a nice, gentle, inexpensive affair down in Philadelphia next year on President’s Day weekend.   The money goes to Perspectives, which teaches LD debate to inner city high school students, thus keeping it in the family.   I know it’s bold, but I think we can make it work; for my PF entries, at least, attending UPenn will actually be cheaper than going to Harvard, even including hotel costs.   I wish the Harvard tournament well for what it is, and indeed hope the competition, for what it’s worth, helps them improve as well.   But next year, we head southwards.

The Last Harvard: PF Final

So Monday continues.   After the Oratory final, I headed into Harvard Square to buy myself a new phone, since the old razr was clearly dead now, rendered brainless by continually confused internal software.   It being around 3 years old, I was due for a relatively cheap phone anyway, in return for selling two more years of marriage to Verizon.

So I lost my phonebook meaning I couldn’t call anyone; but they could call me.   Tim A did, reminding me that I had foolishly offered to fulfill my school’s out round judging obligation with a round on Monday; sheesh, judges who do what they’re supposed to.   Seems that between dealing with the speech side of things, and then acquiring a new phone, I’d promoted myself all the way up to judging finals.

So finals I judged, together with PJ & JP, and two other folks I didn’t know.   I was happy about it since it would give me a chance to see the current State of the Art of Public Forum.

What I got wasn’t really debate, in a way.   The topic was tough: Resolved: That, on balance, the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) has had a positive impact on the United States.   Those four countries have about one thing in common: they’re big. Connected to that, they each have the resources and potential to become a local hegemon in their respective regions.   But no one debated that.

Mostly what was debated, and what I saw in that final, was a complicated calculation of benefit versus harm in economic and foreign policy spheres.   Since the resolution was phrased in the past tense, there was little speculation or risk analysis involved; the teams could only offer stacks of numbers that pointed to their side of the resolution.   The topic offered little unifying principle for weighing across the various domains of national interest, be it economic or military or foreign diplomacy; and it’s even more difficult to demonstrate societal harms and benefits on the international scale.   Then, once you’ve done that, try establishing that those harm/benefits are the BRIC nations’ fault, and showing that the rise of those nations, not their mere existence, is what caused those harms.

Cha, right.

So a debate resolution that’s nearly impossible to do in a doctoral dissertation was even harder to address in the terms of a 35 minute debate round.   Public forum is short and sweet, so tossing them a topic that’s so fiendishly complicated is just begging for unsatisfying argumentation.   In this topic, too, the complexity was not because the topic itself was morally complicated, but because it was just data-sifting; the moral values aren’t addressed at all in this game of my-study-is-better-than-yours.   Even more frustratingly, 9 of those precious 35 minutes are wasted in crossfires.   Crossfires are short periods of mutual cross-examination when the competitors attempt, and usually fail, to make each other look stupid without appearing to do so.   As such, I still haven’t learned anything about how to judge or decide a debate round as the result of a crossfire.   I’ve begun putting down my pen and working on my ballots during them; half attention is usually sufficient to glean anything significant.   Some kids start trying to read cards and throw evidence into them, which despite being against the spirit of the thing, is probably more productive than the intended use.

The debaters didn’t make it any easier.   Both teams approached the round by simply flinging out a mess of varied evidence about the four BRIC nations in various sectors of policy; nuclear disarmament, trade balances, and arming Iraqi insurgents and Hamas (and I’m pretty sure the debater who ran Hamas was conflating them with Hezbollah.)   Neither team offered a weighing standard or proposed a mechanism for assembling all this variegated data into a decision.   That shortfall made the round fail at a critical part of debate.   The only thing that keeps a judge from having to intervene at some level is providing a standard of some sort — a burden, the v/c framework in LD, any sort of mechanism — on how to weigh thousands of lives lost on the negative, against hundreds of billions of dollars gained on the affirmative.   That’s not necessarily an automatic negative win, given that poverty surely has killed far more people globally than bullets or even global warming (so far) have.   Without resolving that key tension — and the debaters didn’t talk about it at all — the round itself cannot truly be resolved, without intervention.     With a standard to weigh against, and even an argument about that standard, judging becomes clear.   Without a standard, it’s an ungodly mess.

And an ungodly mess it was.   My ballot was cast without confidence on the upper end of a 3-2 decision.   Ultimately I weighed the lives the negative was killing off in Iraq and by killer smog as more valuable than the money being gained on the side of the affirmative, since most of those billions have been going to buy rich people’s yachts and not poor people’s medical care and food, and in the absence of aff showing me that poverty kills.   But that’s my take admittedly; however, the debaters didn’t give me any other option besides my take.   So that’s what they’re stuck with on my RFD, until they give me anything else.

The other flaw was the arguments were ultimately uncreative.   There wasn’t much room for creativity, between the topic and the limited format of the round.   We’ve managed a few creative arguments on past topics, but given that the ground to cover in BRIC nations is so enormous, there wasn’t much room for interesting argumentation.   It was just a vast, boring study-war.   Teams were just flinging evidence at each other, and while that’s certainly a skill useful to have, it’s deeply unsatisyfing to me, especially because the round was encouraging them to take all their evidence at face value, and really, that’s a terrible precedent.   But they didn’t have time or ability to question the evidence, to explain it, to understand it on a fundamental level.   So I was left taking on faith that Expert 1 said Russia was evil, while Expert 2 said that without Brazil we’d all be dead, when I know full well that most of these Experts have agendas and motives for saying what they do far beyond facts & reality.

The constant thread I’ve been trying to teach in forensics is encouraging students to think for themselves; that their own thoughts are as valuable as those of the journalists, analysts and experts, and has an equal duty to stand up to intense scrutiny.   After all, one of the defining qualities of our age is that knowledge needed to have deep insights is available and accessible to everyone.   One of America’s consistent social ills is that far too few take an interest in public affairs.   Governing elites always take interest in how the world works, but it serves them for no one else to; their viewpoint dominates when no one else is truly thinking.   That general ignorance may give those elites short term profit, but it also gives us thought-bubbles and echo chambers, and can lead to the lemming-effect disasters such as our economic disaster.   If I can send an army of kids into adulthood having learned how to think and reason from basic data, and to be skeptical of experts, I’ll have done a mitzvah for the world.

Public Forum is alive and well in the MFL circuit, flourishing with divisions of 30-45 teams at any given tournament from 20 different schools.   There are probably upwards of 80 active PF teams in the state.   I have a feeling that much of this success is that we’ve finally introduce a consistent debate event at speech tournaments; there was a lot of unmet demand for debate among speech teams, and the logistics of the MFL gave those kids only the unsatisfying, not-quite-right-for-them outlets of Extemp, Group and Congress.   It’s a shame because the more I exist in PF, the more I wish I was still coaching LD.   For a while I gave PF a pass since it was still trying to find itself, but at this point the brevity is so unsatisfying, and the standards of the event aren’t doing much yet to make up for it.   PF was created in large part to address ills in LD, and was adopted first and strongest by the coaches who felt that LD had lost its way without possible redemption.   I’d argue their leaving made LD weaker, but the manner of the leaving also harmed PF.   The anti-LD kneejerk is still keeping PF from becoming it’s own thing, and if it’s throwing out good aspects of LD such as voting standards in the process, then it’s just reactionary nonsense.   Popular reactionary nonsense, but not much different.

There’s hope for it since.   Better topics would be a start; topics should really have a stronger moral component with more judgment calls other than quantitative analysis.   The topics have trended in a Policy direction but policy permits much more creativity due to the length of the round and concomitant breadth and vagueness of its topics.   No, in a short limited round, a short sharp question-your-values-in-the-public-sphere style topic is best. But up until April’s PF topic, which my students will not debate, we’ve gotten no good ones.   Some acceptable, but none good.   (Change: April has now been published, and of course, it’s the best topic all year.   Sigh).

But radical reform would also be nice.   Get rid of grand crossfire, at least; it’s just stupid.   Reclaim the time into more substantial rebuttals.     I’d also actually get rid of the coinflip nonsense; it makes the ballot confusing, and leads to teams sailing through tournaments never debating one side of the resolution.   Encourage cross examinations, not crossfire, to restore some civility, and sense of intellectual achievement and openness, to the debates.

And for crying out loud, call it aff and neg.

But I doubt it’ll happen.

The Last Harvard: Extemp Recap

First off; the first time around I posted these, I posted the versions with the full names listed; that wasn’t what I’d planned, since in the age of Google, that can leave a permanent stain on what should be a temporary decision.   And as I make clear below, I don’t particularly blame even students even if they pulled the trigger on unethical decisions — and have no evidence of their intent either way.   So I am really sorry about that; but I’ve removed the same with the actual ready for primetime versions.

So what does it mean that by the letter of the law, every student in the Harvard final failed, and by the spirit of the law, it’s possible that at least two did so?

What it does not mean is that these speakers, the ones who flubbed dates or even the ones who may have gone further than that, are horrible, terrible people who will never redeem themselves in the eyes of humanity, or even myself.   I believe it reflects a poor ethical choice if true, but doesn’t really reflect on the individual ethics of the students that that much.   The incentives are stacked against them, after all.   It does reflect poorly on the state of the event, and the lack of safeguards.   After all, when a few people fail a test, the fault is with the taker; when everyone fails a test, the fault is with the test.

As Jonathan put it, there are three areas of quality in an extemp speech which a student can control: the quality of their analysis, the quality of their speaking and presentation, and the quality of their evidence.   The judge, however, can only really account for the first two in the immediacy of judging the round; judges have no immediate way of telling how well sources are used, short of pulling the sources after the speech; and doing that means you’ve possibly flubbed up the smooth running of the tournament and delayed your own time to go home, so there’s a strong social pressure on judges not to check sources.   Therefore, given the limited time the speakers have to concentrate on their speech, there is a very powerful incentive to work on analytic clarity and breadth, and speaking polish, to the exclusion of accuracy and care in sourcing.

However, there has been a parallel effect in extemp, which is the advent of the 12 source speech.   A many-sourced speech sounds impressive to judges, and some judges even go so far as to count sources in a speech, whether or not they’re used effectively.   The extemp community engaged in a sourcing arms war for a while, as a result.   We’ve settled down to a generic standard that a speech should have 1-2 sources in the introduction, and 2-3 sources in each point of analysis, bringing us to a grand total of 7-11 for a Varsity level speech.   That’s what judges expect, and so that’s what the students serve up.

That means two things.   First, and most obvious; you try memorizing 11 sources, 4 of which may be from the same publication on different dates, and maybe 7-8 of which are from newspapers that are really virtually indistinguishable in your mind.   After all, does anyone really recognize whether a given news article was in the New York Times or the Washington Post on a given day? Now do it in 30 minutes, that same 30 minutes during which you have to prepare the speech in the first place, read those citations, integrate them into a coherent anaytic flow, practice it over a few times for delivery, and then calm your shaking nerves because you’re about to deliver it publicly in front of 400 people.   And do all those things in the sure knowledge that, in the vast majority of cases, no one is ever going to know whether you fudge a little bit here on analytics, or screw up a date there.

Now go further, and say you drew a question where you have maybe 10-15 total files in your tub on the topic area.   Suppose further that the exact question was specific enough that most of your sources don’t really apply to it.   You have two choices at this point; you can either just shoot yourself in the foot to begin with and only use 3-4 of the sources, and then stand out from everyone else.   Or, you can find ways to jimmy in your other sources, even though they don’t really relate.   Take the former action and you lose guaranteed; take the latter action and you only lose (assuming you speak well enough) if someone checks up on you, and that happens so rarely as to be inconsequential.

The calculus is clear.   In the absence of consistent checking, speakers will both make mistakes and put themselves into difficult situations.   This problem is a problem with the event itself, not those students.   We do not give students training on avoiding alcohol abuse by telling them they’ll fail at a competitive activity unless they’re drunk, and then toss them into a bar that doesn’t check ID.   That’s a good way to get a lot of drunk kids, not a good way to build lessons.

So what’s the solution?   First is being aware of the problem and the reality of it.   Extemp is under-coached; there aren’t a lot of coaches out there who identify as extemp coaches.   Many programs just have advisors whose interests are in other areas; folks who are perfectly good at getting students to their respective tournaments chaperoned and safely, but who do not really think much about this particular event and pay much attention to it.   A high proportion of extempers are therefore more or less on their own, and coaches and tournament directors don’t really understand the forces at play here.   So awareness is certainly essential.

However, we should take that awareness and act on it, as a community.   We should encourage more, ever stricter checking, coupled with a sharply reduced expectation as to the number and use of sources.   Give to get; require each source be letter perfect, but stop expecting more than say 5 sources in a speech to reach finals.   When we source checked Yale one year, the prep staff mistakenly told the students ahead of the semifinal round that a source check would occur.   The average number of citations per speech plummeted from 9 in the quarterfinal to 4-5 in the semifinal; the quality of the speeches did not suffer, and everyone got each source perfectly correct.   It’s not a temptation to use your 4 good sources, and bend & fudge the rest, when you know everyone else is going to only use that many, and you know that the consequences are likely to be unpleasant.

It would also help if people didn’t try so hard to write questions to trip up extempers.   If your tournament asks questions that involve the food industry or pop culture or the Indonesian minister of the interior — in other words, too bizarre, too lightweight, and too specific, in that order — you’re asking the students to commit sins.   Nobody has 8 sources about the Indonesian cabinet, and unless you want to make the event about filing and not thinking and speaking, nobody should.   High expectations on source count, coupled with such strange questions, are begging for source falsifications.   Do tournament directors really believe that talking about mainstream, headlining challenges in the US economy, the wars, peace in Israel and Palestine, and European politics are so easy that we have to start asking about ever more obscure issues?   Should people who don’t generally pay that much attention to extemp in the first place feel comfortable making that call?

So the solution is clear.   Integrity of sourcing should be paramount and expected more rigorously, as that will directly lower expectations as to the number of sources used.   Ballots should be adjusted to emphasize the use of those sources instead of the quantity thereof, and perhaps even say that a plethora of sources is not to be taken as a sign of a good speaker.   Topics should be written within a legitimate domain of inquiry; don’t go too far afield from the headlines and the major stories, to give students a chance to have enough in the files to speak about them without having to worry about wedging in another citation.

The impact of that course of action would be to make cites easier on the students, and encourage them to think more on their own, which would make the event both less daunting and difficult for them, and hopefully more satisfying.   The academic integrity of sourcing and citation would be re-emphasized at the same time.   And I think the quality of speeches would rise; as students were putting more of their thoughts into it, and spending less time finding their 10 sources in prep, the quality of their speaking skills and their thoughts would benefit as a result.   Extemp is an event that a lot of people don’t want to watch and judge; if the speeches were better, no one would be harmed by it.

I think it’s a good deal for everyone around, eh?   Now I hope people who are essentially outsiders looking in care enough to take action.

The Last Harvard: Extempers 5 & 6

The final round check continues.   NB, I’m getting emails about this series of posts, surprisingly to me — I wasn’t aware I had readers.   I haven’t read them yet, explicitly because I want to finish this and my comments on it first.   The emails may well explain and correct some omissions, but I’m building evidence for a broader point here, which isn’t the one I bet you think it is, and then I’ll respond to the thoughts contained in the emails.

Speaker 5

Q.       Is Mexico in danger of becoming a failed state?

Answer:   Nope.

Intro:

Harvard International Review 5.20.08        Characteristics of failed states is lack of civil, econ, social structures

I wasn’t able to find this reference.   This claim is a broad enough that it might have been definition in the bottom of an article about something else; it’s a straightforward definition of a failed state.   In fact, it’s rather self-evident, not really requiring a citation.   I’m also curious about the citation; Harvard International Review is a seasonal publication, so 5/20/2008 is awfully precise.   Perhaps this was the wrong publication name.   It’s possible the speaker’s pulling one here to get a Harvard name into the Harvard final round, which would get a big glare from me, but not a DQ if I were tournament director.

1.       Reform in Mexico is occurring, and the government wants it.

CSM 1.19.09   Calderon held a contest to identify the most useless bureaucractic procedure in the Mex gov’t.   points to reform minded.

Article: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0113/p06s01-woam.html

Got the date wrong by a couple of days, but the facts and story are substantiated by the article.

Economist 1.24.09   Calderon authorized a 3% of gdp stimulus into the mex economist.   That large of a stim represents a nonfailed state.

Article: http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12974119

Again, off by a pair of days, but the facts clear out.

2.       Attitude to democracy is not failed

Economist 11.15.08 50% of Mexicans feel democracy is better than any other form of gov’t.   higher than Latin American avg view towards democracy.

Article: http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12607297

The speech seems to have a standard 2-3 day margin of error going on here, but it’s doing just fine when it comes to the truth of the claims.

M. Delal Baer; some book — Mexico is a nascent weak democracy but among mexicans there’s a strong attitude in favor of democracy.

M Delal Baer — it took me a little while to find the correct spelling — is a fellow of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.   It’s hard to source check a book remotely, since I’m not going to go out and buy every book he’s written, since they all seem to be about Mexico.   But it’s a non controversial claim attributed to someone who’d probably have an opinion on this subject.   However, I wonder a little why the speaker felt the need to include it, given that the Economist reference said much the same thing.

3.   US power will not allow Mexico to fail.

John Raskin book The New World of Intl Relations — since the advent of NAFTA the US/Mex economy are intertwined.   the US/Mexico relationsip means Mexican chaos means US losses.   US auto makers would be screwed.

Book (I think): http://www.amazon.com/IR-World-International-Relations-MyPoliSciKit/dp/0136130542/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235947151&sr=8-1

That’s Michael Roskin (and Nicholas Berry).   Again, it’s a book, but again it’s a noncontroversial claim; I might have preferred that the speech instead give some numbers and prove this point on its own, but the ethics of the source are probably sound.   Hell, the speaker may even have gotten the author right; the book looks like the type that might contain a bunch of sub-essays or something.

FT 1.4.09       The US auto industry retains vast political power within the US.

Today I discovered that even the website of the Financial Times is pink.   I did not, however, discover this article; I looked a couple days backwards and forwards.   They did have a bunch of articles on the car industry around early January; it was when the automakers were asking for a bailout, so I’m guessing that it was some line about how despite the car maker CEOs being embarrassed and made to kneel in obeisance before Congress, they still maintain lobbying power etc.

This line of reasoning wasn’t really necessary to this speech; I mean, it’s good to make a link and all, but asserting that the main reason that the US would not let the Mexican government collapse is that US Auto would suffer is a bit like saying we only like a stable Canada for the hockey; kind of misses the overall significance.   But ah well.

Current History:   2.08 Mexico has a long way to go; econ growth is stagnant, etc etc.

Article:   http://www.currenthistory.com/Article.php?ID=520

Current History doesn’t make its archival articles freely available, but despite that the title of the article makes it clear that this claim is warranted.

Comments:   This speaker passed also with flying colors; that surprised me a little bit, honestly, because I didn’t like this speech very much; it would have been the clear 6 on my ballot.   I’d have to confirm that the book cites were legitimate, but really, it seems very clear to me that they would.   I didn’t think it spun a convincing analytic story, but instead plugged together sources and ideas in a way that was a little implausible, and didn’t show much knowledge of the deeper workings of these issues.   The speaker was, however, very comfortable and fluent, even if the humor fell a little flat.   But then, most of the audience was extempers, and extempers are a humorless bunch.

I tend to mentally associate dodgy sourcing with speakers I don’t like, particularly the kind of speaker who seems to get there on speaking without much underlying analytic ability.   I’m not one of those people who thinks extempers should sound and speak horribly to prove their analytic bona fides, but I do dislike pretty words with no substance more than anything.   So honestly I was most disposed to think this speaker would be bad at citations, and despite me being a complete cynic, the speech actually demonstrated excellent ethics.   The speaker would probably be a good analyst with just a little more focus on it; I hope it happens.

Speaker 6

Q.       Can Barack and Raul thaw the icy relations that existed between George and Fidel?Answer:   Yes We Can.

Intro:   A limerick.   It didn’t scan (big whoop) but it did rhyme and got applause.

1. Ending bitterness makes sense for Raul Castro

1.4.09       NYT low/no economic growth in Cuba, food troubles:

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/world/americas/02cuba.html?scp=3&sq=Raul+Castro&st=nyt

Yes.   Date was wrong; looks like the speech switched dates with the below article.

1.2.09       Fidel used to handle this by blaming the US.

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/weekinreview/04DePalma.html?scp=2&sq=Cuba&st=nyt

Yep, the article supports the claim.

1.30.09 Independent Obama is more popular in Cuba while Raul gets some resentment (so the charge may not stick this time).

This is the closest I could find: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/raul-castro-cuba-still-faces-incessant-struggle-against-us-1221915.html

This one is a little dicey and difficult, though it might not be the right source.   It’d be hard data to acquire.   After all, it’s not like Cuba conducts opinion polls, so data on how popular the Cuban regime is or isn’t, or how Obama is seen, is going to by necessity always be the sum of anecdotes.   I think I would have, at the very least, phrased this assertion differently.   There’s plenty of reason to analyze on one’s own how Raul will have to tread carefully; among other things, the biggie being that he’s not Fidel.     So I’m giving a guarded C- on this use of a citation, but I don’t think it’s actually treading into DQ grounds.

2.       Obama victory sets up someone who wants to do it.

2.7.08       Econ’st Many Obama proposals fly in the face of what Intl Comm wants.

I think this is the one: http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13031240

The date is off, and it’s a little weak of a reference, and it cites a conclusion, but it’s there in a reasonably defensible manner, and I know it to be true enough otherwise.

NYT sometime — UN condemns trade embargo

Ok, I didn’t find the exact source (“sometime” is a bit hard to track, but that’s my omission, not the speaker’s) but this definitely happened in the time frame of most files:

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hzcpxqeAdo9cbz02WNIb9rCudT0w

Lexington Inst Anya Landau French -> cuba is low hanging fruit, an easy fopo victory.

Article: http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1231.shtml

The article supports that, yes.

3.       US domestics open to the idea

12.15.08       CSM       Cuban americans, esp the young, no longer see the Castros as vicious enemies.   open to negations

Article: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1215/p04s01-usgn.htm

Yes, that checks out fine.

Florida Int’l U polling outfit some poll       55% want better relations with Cuba.

Poll document is here: http://www.fiu.edu/~ipor/cuba-t/Cuba-T.pdf

Yes, this is supportive.   I’m pretty certain the speaker’s referring to the 55% majority who oppose continuing the embargo.

“The Nation that Dared” Maria Sanchez Cubans are more open to capitalism; potentially beneficial force.   Raul has to introduce reforms to appease his people.

That’s “The Island that Dared” by Dervla Murphy.   I have no idea where either the speaker or I got “Maria Sanchez”.   But whatever, the book is a travelogue of Cuba that I’ve actually read, and it’s supportive of that assertions.

Comments:   This speech wasn’t letter-perfect the way that Speaker 4 was, but it passed easily as well.   The speech sort of pulled a style point fail on one of them, and the other was possibly the wrong article or a big stretch, but it still passes.

The Last Harvard: Extempers 3 & 4

All right, so apparently Food was the semis and Energy was the quarter finals topic, as A HALF DOZEN ANAL RETENTIVE EXTEMPERS felt the need to share with me last evening.   Mea culpa!

Carrying on with the increasingly disappointing source check, however:

Speaker 3

Q.   Is drug legalization in the US a viable strategy for reducing drug-related violence in Latin America?

Answer: Nope!

Intro.

Missed the first citation in the intro; speaker rushed by it.   However, the claim was that legalization, by making drugs readily available, would lower the demand?   Did I hear this right?   NB seems the rest of the speech says the opposite, so I bet I did hear it right, or it was one of those cases when debaters arguing aff conclude by saying “I urge a neg ballot…I MEAN AFF!”

1st subpoint: Legalization would increase cartel revenue, leading to more violence.

1.   NYT 2.2.09       Revenue providing for weapons for cartels come from US consumers.

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02pot.html?scp=7&sq=drug%20cartels&st=cse

The article does not provide evidence for the claim that most of the drug cartel money comes from US consumers.   Now, this claim is true, and honestly doesn’t really need a citation to back it up; it’s common knowledge.   So this fudging of a source might really be about racking up more totals in source counts, not really fabrication.   Still, that’s shady if that’s what’s going on here.

Reuters 2.10.09 use this money to buy weapons.

OK, I had a hard time tracking this down exactly.   There was a 2.10.09 Reuters article that didn’t mention guns.   There’s a 2.26.09 article that talks extensively about this problem, but also came out after the tournament.   However, finally I did track down:

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE50A1QB20090111

So I’ll give a pass on this one; the claim again is not a hard one to support.

This doesn’t mention, however, the fact that this point is broken and doesn’t help the case; the assumption that illegal cartels would benefit from legalization is a stretch.

Point 2: Would harm US/Mexico relations

Council on Foreign Relations 11.20.08: Attempts to limit drug violence between US and Mexico means closing off the border.

Article: http://www.cfr.org/publication/13689/

OK, it’s possible that I got the claim down wrong; honestly this speaker wasn’t very clear; I think probably due to nerves, which I totally understand and sympathize with.   It’s a common problem among finalists, and one of the reasons why semis are often better rounds than finals.   However, the article does not support the claim that the border is closing tighter because of the drug war; it simply mentions the not-very-revelatory fact that drug operations are cross-border in nature.

Economist 1.22.08   US government doesn’t give Mexico much respect; policy change would confirm that.

This one is old.   Also, it was under the Bush administration, which changes everything.   He may have gotten the date wrong; in fact I hope the speaker did because I can’t find it.   I did find this:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11580704

It was June 19th, 2008, which is much more in range than Jan 22nd, which puts it far into the realm of “honest slip”, especially since citing the earlier date hurts the case; it’s not like the speaker was trying to conceal the age of the source.

However, that kind of citation is exactly the sort of loose, citing conclusions that I find ineffective.   “The US respects Mexico” is not a fact, it is a thesis, and if you’re going to present that in a speech, even from a respected publication, it cannot be as a fait accompli.   The Economist has been wrong in its conclusions before, as has every other major publication; and it’ll be wrong again.   You can cite a fact, and I’ll trust that the paper has fact checked it as much as is reasonable (not always safe, but we have to draw the line somewhere.)   But an argument or a position doesn’t work like that; no matter who said it, it has to be defended, and proven, not simply cited.

However, that criticism is more in the realm of “what I’d write on my ballot, were I judging.”   It’s style points, not rule violations.

May/June Foreign Affairs Kauffman   — Legalization would be disaster; can’t control cartels or terrorist groups without int’l controls and cooperation

OK now my sympathy has flown out the window.   There is no article in Foreign Affairs in all of 2008 about drug legalization.   There is an article in May/June Foreign Affairs by a guy named Hoffman, whose thesis is that Al Qaeda remains a threat to US security; Hoffman doesn’t even talk about international cooperation being a way to combat terror groups.   He doesn’t talk about drugs, Mexico, Latin America, or anything related.

I can’t prove a negative.   I can’t say that the speaker didn’t have an article in some other journal that had a similar name that did talk about this issue in the way that he says.   But, given how specific the citation was — how many other journals publish on a bimonthly basis? — I strongly suspect the speaker didn’t.

And you know, I’ve been giving speakers a pass for muddling the date and the publication a little, but that makes me wonder — why have them give dates and titles at all, if they’re all going to flub it up?   The root problem here isn’t that it’s impossible to memorize 7 sources perfectly, it’s that we shouldn’t be expecting 7 sources in the first place.

Point 3.   Would increase cross border violence between USA and Latin America

WaPo 1.4.09   Drug culture in the US is hidden but no less violent elsewhere.   Doesn’t depend on ready availability but effects on the human psyche.   Violent drug culture would increase and has nothing to do with illegality

I was not able to find this article despite searching through a lot of results in the Washington Post for both January and February.   I find this a little disturbing, since these claims are central to the argument; this citation should have been clear above all others.   Without this citation, which should be very easy to find, a lot of his logic falls directly apart.   If the speaker didn’t have this cite on source check, it would be a clear DQ.

NYT 2.2.09 Loosening drug policy would mean more people crossing borders and thus under no one’s control.

Same article as listed above.   This statement is not supported by the article either; it refers to things like “borders” and such but does not support this claim directly.

Comments:

This speaker didn’t seem to actually understand the question, and I feel that might have contributed to a lot of the questionable use of sources in this speech; so the lapses may not be ethical in nature, but simply the combination of nerves and an unfortunate draw. In some cases I can pass that by, but honestly, if the Foreign Affairs article cited was the Hoffman article I found, that would be no defense against my wrath if I were the tournament director presented with this evidence.

He also didn’t answer the question.   As a result, I feel that the speaker may have done a lot of bending his sources to fit a flawed view of the question itself; which is still a severe ethical lapse, but one borne from ignorance, not shenanigans.   Or maybe ignorance with a side of shenanigans.

However, the bottom line is, unless the speaker produced some true miracles from the files, this speech would not have survived a source check.

NB: The note about Michael applies here too; I coached Matt very briefly at that same UTNIF a few years ago, and have chatted with him a few times since, and have a general impression of “good kid, likable guy.”

Speaker 4

Q.   Should the US Government restore suspended trade benefits to Bolivia?

Answer: Nope.

Intro:

1.25.09 NYT   Bolivia approved a new constitution with 60% vote.   Strips rights from some of the population, very big and complex

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/world/americas/26bolivia.html?scp=1&sq=bolivia%20constitution&st=cse

Yep that’s fine.   Though the bit about stripping rights is implicit, not explicit.

1. Bolivia has failed to guarantee basic economic rights

2.4.09 CSM Bolivia has world’s largest reserves of lithium.   They’re not being accessed by int’l community b/c Evo says no.   Bolivia tried to harvest it themselves with big investment but held up by bureaucracy.

Article: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0204/p25s15-woam.htm

This is a textbook example of a good cite.   The speaker cited the exact facts and built original conclusions off of them.

1.22.09 Economist Bolivia limiting land holdings to 12,400 acres.   the large landholdings are efficient and experienced.   bad for the nation since limiting them means less food.

Article: http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12974135

So far, perfect.   This article makes exactly those claims.

2.   Bolivia is not making political progress

1.22.09       Economist (again) indigenous communities in the north vote by community not by individual.   Gov’t looks the other way.   boosts Evo’s numbers.

Article (repeat): http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12974135

Yes, the article listed above also supports this statement.

12.8.08 CSM       Bolivia is divided.   North indigenous at odds with capitalistic industrialized south.

Oh man, we were on such a roll; I can’t find this article.   I think it’s probably a cite flub, or a recording flub on my part, since this division is well known and well documented; in fact a different CSM article refers to it:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1007/p09s01-coop.html

3.   Bolivia is failing USA on the war on drugs

3.08 Council on Foreign Relations.   60k acres of coca in Bolivia to become exports of cocaine in the US.   Bolivia makes eradication voluntary.   The growers are Evo’s support base, so he won’t move against them.

I wasn’t able to find this report either.   However, the facts are abundantly confirmed by the Internet at large, though most of them are a little old.   So there’s a chance here that’s the speaker’s postdating a source to make it seem more recent, but new reports on foreign affairs often have to rely on older data, since new data on many countries is sometimes untrustworthy or nonexistent.

For example, most of the facts are listed here in a Reuters article:

http://www.redorbit.com/news/international/337055/bolivia_coca_crusade_may_antagonize_us/

12.8.08 Washington Post Bolivia evicted drug agents of the US.

I noted in my margins that I screwed up the date on this one; so I wasn’t able to find the article exactly; at any rate the expulsion of the DEA by Morales is well documented; the only Post article I could find was this one, but it’s fair enough, and the speaker may have had a better one:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/21/AR2008112103615.html

Comments

I wasn’t hugely impressed by this speech at the time.   The speaker didn’t explain the instrument by which trade policy is the best mechanism, or even a good mechanism, to right the wrongs that listed above, and that holding back open trade would convince Morales to toe the line instead of just retrenching further.   The speech didn’t talk about trade much at all.

However, the citations were nearly perfect.   It flubbed very few dates, and it’s perfectly possible that the mistakes are mine in transcriptions, not the speaker’s own.   None of the claims were based around loose conclusions or thoughts; every one of them described facts or events that he then used for his own analysis.   Pass, with flying colors.