Hi

I believe some of you have seen my rather depressive post on facebook after the first day of Oxford. So here is how it was for me in more details. Hopefully, others will post their reflections later.

Friday:

Round 1. THW allow deaf couples to use medical technology to ensure they have deaf offsprings.

Wonderful motion. We are in the first opposition, which could be the best position for such a motion, and we were against Cambridge and Birmingham, which could be not the best opponents for the first round. Overall, the debate went quite good: we had our arguments, analysed them to a certain extent, were involved in a debate throughout all the round etc. However, natives are natives, thus by one speaker point we lost to Cambridge and by two to Birmingham. Third place, one point, but wonderful debate, looking for the next round. Lesson: wining natives is hard, but not impossible.

Round 2. THW welcome a European superstate.

This is something that is debated in the real world nowadays, but something that I’m not excited about at all. International relations were always the hardest debates for me, since I know nothing what’s happening in the world, neither have any interest in knowing it. I would rather read a book than latest news. Anyway, we are in the second proposition. The debate went not the way we initially thought it would. The first government argued about economic integration etc., which to my mind is quite irrelevant, since you don’t need superstate for that. Moreover, first opposition were refuting their stuff with some more economic bullshit (for instance that rich and old European countries are exploiting poor and small EU countries). Talking about economics seemed to be useless, since judges were quite readily buying the bullshit, so we tried to squeeze in some geopolitics, which we don’t really understand well. Result: we suck, last place, lost to ESL teams, dignity is lost. It was surprising that the first opposition with their arguments like “rich states don’t want poor states to take away their resources” or “rich states want to exploit the market in poor states for their our benefit” won the debate. Please note that it was unclear till the end of the debate who exactly (rich or poor states) loses from this policy.

Round 3. THW redirect all state art funding for reproduction of classic works of art into new works of art.

First government. What could be more awesome in the first government than such a motion!? This is a great economic motion where we could insert concepts of taxes, externalities etc. We were unbelievably happy with this motion! In fact, we were so happy that went to our room (which was in another building) without others and … got lost! When we came back to the Union, the round has already started and we were told that they have put a swing team (consisting of one speaker in fact) in our position. We were screwed and sad. Shit happens, but why exactly now. We got zero team and speaker points for this round. The results from Friday: 1 point in three rounds. The other team (Ervinas and Aurimas) did a better job and got 3 points during the first day.

Evening. I don’t want to talk about the social itself. To my mind opening a club like Purple Turtle is a crime against humanity, and one should be hung for this. Anyway, in addition to my bad experience from debating, I was stopped by a policeman. After the social, we went to McDonald’s. While others were buying junk food, me and Roberts had a smoke. A policeman approaches us and says he could smell weed. We ask what he is trying to say by that. He advised us to tell deliberately if we are doing something illegal We told we are clean. So he told that he is going to search us. He searched us for 10 minutes, found nothing. I don’t know why, but he told that he has to fill in a blank about the search F***! If you screwed up by accusing the innocent guys, why you need to tell it to your boss!? Moreover, why you need to waste our time. Anyway, now I have a police protocol as a souvenir There are about 40 million taxpayers in the United Kingdom, so policemen should report that their money is spent efficiently

Saturday:

Round4. THW give the UN Secretary General the power to unilaterally send peacekeepers into regions that are beyond the effective control of their governments.

First government again. And again the debate is going to be in Lincoln Lecture Room (the place we had to have the third round). And again we didn’t have a debate there, since the room was taken by somebody else So, we had a debate in a bar. Like in the second round, we knew essentially nothing about the motion in terms of concepts and facts, but it turned out that our opponents knew much less The debate was definitely a torture to my ears, and I wanted to kill all the other speakers for it. We won the debate and were very very very surprised when we found out that it was not even the worse bin room. Our colleagues from SSE Riga got zero points, so we got ahead of them even with a missed round on Friday

Round 5. THW abolish patents and replace them with government funded awards in recognition of R&D.

Second opposition. Economic/business motion, we know a lot about it, we should win. The debate was not really good: we had one team from Paris and one from India. We won the round and were looking forward to the last round, which should have resolved whether we break or not. We have 7 points after 5 rounds and small chances of breaking.

Round 6. THBT universities should not license societies that define themselves by gender, race nationalhood or sexuality.

Great motion! We are in the second proposition. We got into a room against all natives: Scotland, England, USA. The debate was awesome, we tried our best not to screw it up, and I think we managed. We were involved with native speakers, providing some reasonable material and overall I was really satisfied with the round. We lost the debate, but by a very small margin, and it is great that we are able to reasonably debate against speakers.

Breaks:

The last ESL team that broke into semis had 7 points. Me and Roberts needed 52-55 speaker points more each in order to break. In everyday language this means, we could have came to the third round, puked on the table and then we would have broke. F***! Feeling of misery and a great missed opportunity.

Quarters, semis and finals:

We went to see main quarters and it was awesome. Then I went to see ESL finals, since Mihail and Olena were debating there, and it was terrible. Once again I felt misery for ESL speakers (including me and all our society). Finals were extremely awesome.

That’s it. On Sunday we had a nice tour around Oxford with Martins as a main guide. Then we went to eat some fish&chips and have traditional English ale. Then we bought some more ale and went to Martins’ place. At night I left the city and went home looking forward to some econometrics action the next week. Overall, feelings are mixed. On the one hand we had a decent practise, on the other I feel much misery about the missed real opportunity of breaking. Lessons learnt: don’t miss rounds, need to learn some international relations and politics if want to perform well on WUDC.

P.S. Million thanks to Martins and his friends for hospitality!

Cheers

Nikita

You can find all the results and some analysis here:
Results

These were the motions set at the SSE Riga Practice Tournament this weekend:

Round 1: THW give parents proxy votes for their children
Round 2: THW give North Korea unconditional food aid
Round 3: THW allow surrogate motherfood for profit
Round 4: THW ban equality movements focusing on one group only
Final: THW tie the liabilities of borrowers to the value of their provided collateral

Once again, I had enormous pleasure spending this day with all of you. Thanks to all, and I hope to meet you again soon.

Martin

Hi

There are certain thoughts well-established in society that most of us takes as true. One of these is that secondhand smoking harms. Now I am writing my report in Business Ethics and came across a wonderful resource against anti-smoking campaigns. It is the home page of FOREST (Freedom Organization for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco). It has many great reports or essays that cast huge doubt on the credibility of anti-smoking campaigns and previous research in this field.

Their home page:

http://www.forestonline.org/output/Home.aspx

Probably, the best essay there:

http://www.forestonline.org/upload/Smoking%20Out%20The%20Truth.pdf

Smoking is not that bad at the end of the day. Sucks that I already quit.

Cheers

Nikita

The new debating season has begun and hopefully you are already planning to participate in many interesting tournaments. Following from the members of the group on Facebook bearing the same name as this post, I can see that not everyone in our society is familiar with the proposition to visit Moscow in the end of November (28-29). Briefly – no reg fee, huge city, controversial country, and somewhat lower quality debating than Oxbridge . Find out more at
http://www.mgimodc.ru/mo2009
and
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=143095999233.

Two more notes. First, SSE Riga has participated in this tournament on multiple occasions and done very well – see Results page for autumn 2004 and 2006. I bet that the finalist in 2004 can tell you pretty interesting stuff about that trip. Second, travel to Moscow is easy. From Riga there are in principle 3 options (bus, train, plane) out of which one sucks (bus). If I remember correctly (and not much has changed) then there should be 2 flights a day (one in the morning, one in the evening) and now only 1 train per day (at 18:10, daily). Visa costs approximately LVL 30 and can be done in any travel agency.

If you would like to find out more about Moscow Open or travel-related stuff, don’t hesitate to e-mail or contact me in any other way. I would join you if you decide to go (unless you convince me that this is a bad idea)…

Martin

PS. In 2006 we visited a bar called Zolotaya Vobla in Moscow and witnessed a bunch of guys drinking happily, then throwing beer glasses at each other, then drinking friendlily again

Hi

For those who still hasn’t heard anything about the EU report on Russia – Georgia conflict, you could find the information here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8281990.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8284046.stm

It could be beneficial for debates to read these articles, since this motion was one of the most popular the previous year. Considering the publication of the report, may be we will see it once again on some tournament.

Cheers

Nikita

Dear dammen und herren,

I would like to draw your attention towards the fact that the lithuanian team from SSE have reached the final of Word Online Debating Championships, hosted on Debatewise. The motion: We should prize freedom over security and abolish anti-terrorism laws (direct link is here). You can read the debate and vote for the team that in your opinion is stronger. We’ll publish reflections on the tournament in the near future.

EJ

Hi

This blog hasn’t seen any updates for a while. I have just came across an idea of Tobin tax, which I was barely familiar with before. So I did some research and found an article that explains more or less what is it about and lists all the pros and cons. Hope this could be helpful. Btw, we could try debating on Tobin tax the next session, or it could be a great motion for an open motion tournament, since it is very hard to debate on it for a non-economist.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/aug/30/11

Some more also could be found here http://mondediplo.com/1997/12/leader

Cheers

Nikita

EUDC 2009 is now finally over. It was an awesome experience, and I would love to share it with all of you.

Yes, we were stopped in our quest for success in the ESL quarterfinals. Which is a pity. I still believe that we had the capacity to achieve far more. The debate was set for the motion THW allow the Police to physically discipline children below the age of criminal responsibility. We obviously were first government. I guess that for none of you it will be a surprise that we are generally weak in debates about family policy, children issues etc. So the position and motion were not pleasant surprises.

But that is only one half of the story. We also did not manage to maintain a strong team line in the debate, and that backfired. After the debate it was clear that we did not dominate it; however, we still thought we had tangible chances to advance further (and this feeling was reinforced by some parts of the audience). It was not pleasant to hear that did not make it to the semis. At least alcohol was as good as ever.

On a more positive note, it seems that we have done wonders on the ESL tab. I somehow managed to finish as the 3rd speaker on the ESL tab, while Arvydas was the 8th best. Actually (warning – serious bragging ahead) we had more speaker points than some of the teams that made it to the main break. If just we had not screwed up the last two rounds.. So, even though we sucked in the break rounds, I still believe that this was a great way how to end our debating career together. So yeah, Arvydas, I think we made a really good team.

OK, so enough about us. EUDC had a lot of other action on the offer. Let’s talk about all of it one by one:

(1) After the total failure witnessed in Cork Worlds, this time ESL final was actually quite good. Motion: THW remove all legal restrictions on genetic enhancement (or something along those lines). I would have loved to debate this motion. Although, as one would expect, ESL debaters are not the best public speakers, content-wise the debate was very clever and engaging. Well done all ESL teams! The title was captured by team Leiden A. It was about time Rob Honig got that honour – he is a fantastic speaker & also a great person to communicate with.

(2) Main break final this time was overshadowed by the semi-final between two Oxford teams, Tel Aviv and UCD L&H. Fantastic motion – This House believes that desecration of religious sites is a legitimate tactic of warfare. To be honest, this was the best debate I have seen in my life. Speeches were clever, engaging, witty and absolutely mesmerizing. It absolutely had the property that I have observed in all the good debates – participants were grasping reality with both hands. No arguments were formal and constructed only to participate in the debate – all them were relevant and ones that should be considered when deciding this matter in real life.

(3) The final evidently lacked the aforementioned passion. THW remove all restrictions on immigration. Three Oxford teams and Tel Aviv, the biggest ESL surprise of the tournament. (A joke in the beginning of Tel Aviv whip speech: How many Oxford teams does it take to take out the Israelis? Four.) I had a feeling that teams were effectively arguing against each other and subscribing to far too contrasting ideologies. It also was less engaging and funny than the semi-final (with the obvious exception of Tel Aviv, of course). Oxford A, Sheng Wu Lee (I hope I spell that correctly) and Jonathan Leader Maynard, picked up the title. They are an unbelievable team. Especially Sheng Wu, the king of clarity.

(4) I am still unsure what to say about this year’s motions. On one hand, a lot of the motions were brilliant and really inventive (This House believes that desecration of religious sites is a legitimate tactic of warfare, THB the gay rights movement should oppose gay marriages, THB western liberal countries have a moral duty to spread democracy across the world using force where necessary or THW use the education system to instill moral norms in children beyond mere obedience to the law). On the other hand, there still are two things that I am upset about. Firstly, as already mentioned in previous posts, lack of any economic motions. I just don’t think that heavy reliance on political philosophy/social policy is something debate community should aspire to. Secondly, the similar nature of a lot of motions. Many debates (THW allow police officers to use entrapment, THW allow the Police to physically discipline children below the age of criminal responsibility) were focused around very similar principles.

In short, EUDC was the place to be. Thanks for the many wishes & support we have received in these days. Hope to meet all of you soon & have a beer. (Or two. Or three.)

See you,

M.

A very short entry ahead.

We have just returned from the break party. It seems that we did screw up the last round (we finished last). However, that still was enough to finish as the 7th best team on the ESL tab. First time a SSE Riga team has broken in Euros, I believe (that’s right, compliments to myself).

Although we were still holding the vain hoping of making it into the main break, now it seems that even winning the last round would not have been enough. The last teams that made it had 15 team points & very high speaker points. We’ll get over it.

Tomorrow morning we will participate in the ESL quarterfinals. There we will face Leiden A, Galatasaray A and Haifa C – all strong teams. We will try not to let you down.

Take care,

M.

It is good that I can start my third entry on a positive note. The preliminary rounds have passed, and, even though we do not know the results of the last round, we have already made the ESL break, and still have some chances to make it to the main break. To be honest, that’s quite pleasant. We’ll see how the last round has played out tonight during the break party & later let you know.

The short recap: 12p/18p.

After failing in the third round yesterday, we had a refreshingly good start of the day. We won two debates in a row. Both had really cool motions (THBT the gay rights movement should oppose gay marriages & THBT western liberal countries have a moral duty to spread democracy across the world using force where necessary). I guess we simply nailed it – we somehow managed to approach the motions in a good way, and that paid off.

After 5 rounds and 11 points, we found ourselves in a good room with teams from Cambridge, Durham and Tel Aviv. The motion was THBT custody hearings should not take a child’s biological parentage into account. In my humble opinion, a very tough motion for the government side of the bench. We were 2^nd Gov & the only reason why we were third was that the opening government was even worse. Oh well, we are not good at debates about domestic issues anyway.

So we wondered into the last round with 12 points and a realistic chance to squeeze into the main break. Motion: THW allow doctors to actively lie to their patients in order to create or augment a placebo effect. Nothing particularly interesting. We do not want to speculate about how it went, but we will find out tonight.

One small, although not particularly useful, observation. There were no real economic motions in any of the preliminary rounds. I find this a bit strange. If the debating community expects debate motions to be somewhat representative of the problems in the world, I am sure that economic issues deserve more than one seventh of them. Just because many people find it hard to debate those issues, does not necessarily mean that they should not be required to tackle them. I hope to see some classy economics motions in the break rounds.

That’s it for now. Hope all is fine for everybody.

Take care,

M.