nan | 楠木

Today is the final day. After finishing our own EFL final yesterday, I was in a particularly light mood, hoping to enjoy some great debating.
In the morning I was in the Semi which had Alaska, one of the teams I was rooting for. Unfortunately they were Opening Gov in a quite frustrating motion (I thought), that websites glorifying eating disorders should be banned. They mainly defined it as a debate on fashion websites, which I thought wasn’t as advantageous as they could have made it.
At noon, we traveled to UBC for the last time. After lunch we walked around the campus for a bit, finding it to be much larger than we had formerly thought. My teammate found the Museum of Anthropology, which she was greatly interested in. And therefore she skipped the ESL final for it.
I didn’t. The ESL final motion was that politicians have the right to a private life, which I thought was quite a cliche topic. Or maybe that’s because I personally have seen it too many times in Debatabase probably. The Indian team which was opening Gov did not do a good job of really defining the debate: it was their duty and to their advantage that they define it to a specific type of behavior which they want to consider as private. Unfortunately they didn’t, which meant the Opp could talk about all sorts of stuff from business transactions to the obvious sex issues. And because they didn’t narrow down the debate, they couldn’t draw the crucial line between what is private and what is public. And that’s a line they have to draw, or they’ll get eaten alive by the Opp. Which was what happened.
The Grand Final was on a motion which I thought must be debated at this year’s Worlds. I was surprised that we didn’t meet any topics on environmentalism so far (since there were so many debates in the real world on this topic this year, with the Stern report et al.); as it turns out, they saved it for the final. The motion: economic development is the solution to climate change. I thought it could be a classic debate between conservatives and environmentalists. However that wasn’t the way it turned out: Opening Gov defined their motion as that they will set up a global carbon trading system, which will develop the economy and solve the pollution problem. Which I thought was quite a tricky definition. Opening Opp duly proposed a counter-prop of setting up a flat carbon tax, which they thought was better. So it got down to a classic economics question: using the market force or using the tax? I thought neither side really got down to explaining the crucial differences, and the debate itself would have got too technical anyways (it already was). Therefore it wasn’t as enjoyable as could have been.
Heading back to the Sheraton, we awaited the final results. It was delayed, so that the adjudicators could discuss it more. Finally we had things started at around 8:15. Which was good for me, since I fell asleep and could have missed the whole thing. Which would have been very unfortunate since we had won the EFL competition!