Pacific University Speech Tournament: Part I "Beatnik Poetry"

Extemp 1: Why the Canadian economy sucks.

Extemp 2: Foreign aid from Egypt? I think not.

Debate 1: Jonathan Kadish and I seemed to have the judge convinced that freedom of the press really does do more harm than good. Stupid constitution...

Debate 2: "Econodogs" Kadish and Anderson show that the economic principle of profit maximization, when marginal revenue equals marginal cost, obviously shows that we don't need to do anything about illegal immigration. Opponents claim that the justification for doing something about illegal immigration is that since the situation can be improved, we are obligated to improve it. By logical extension of that argument, since we can always improve the level of illegal immigration until there are no illegal immigrants, we should therefore reduce the number of illegal immigrants to 0. How's that for an efficient allocation of resources, eh?

Debate 3: --A brief sketch in quotes--
Scene: Adam and Jon arguing that the death penalty should be abolished in the US
Them, during prep time (according to Dan Szymkowiak and Alex Rodriguez): "Yeah, they'll probably throw some of that constitutional shit in our faces."

Their brilliance: "Our prison population is just going to keep growing and growing if we stop putting people to death. That's why we need the death penalty. This way we can just put people to death as new inmates fill our existing prisons."

Jon's lamo question: "Are you aware than more and more victims' families are actually starting to prefer life in prison over the death penalty?"
Opponent: "Are you aware that you're wrong?!"

Opponent (angrily shouting and waving his finger at me): "If I saw you killing my mother, I would chase you down and kill you!!" (made even more awkward by the fact that his mother was actually in the room at the time--no comment)

Adam, being wishy-washy after being scared out of his wits by psycho child above: "While their emotional appeal was eloquent, it doesn't really hold water. Once you're dead, you're dead!"

This round was amazingly weird. Our opponents were definitely of a conservative bent. True, Jon and I are flaming liberals with an occasional streak of economic conservatism, but I can respect certain aspects of conservatism when they're reasonable and logically developed (at least in a very abstract, theoretical sense). I have respect for the intelligent fiscal conservative, and I have some vague respect for various other conservative features too (not for radical evangelical conservatism, radical moral conservatism, dictatorial conservatism, warmongering conservatism, or any of the other idealogies polluting today's Republican party... I'm off the map now... Let's just forget about all that.). But I have no respect for wackos of any political persuasion, especially not ones who try to throw around conservative ideas without knowing what the heck they are saying. These people were definitely the wacko type. I'm sorry, but calling the constitution feces, even in conversation, or that death penalty is how we currently keep the prison population in check, is indicative of absolute insanity. It was definitely the classic sort of culture clash between the obnoxious liberal elitists (us) and the worst sort of stereotypical people, erroneously claiming to be Republicans, whose party affiliations would fit better in with the Third Reich than America.

Today was fun though. I think some people from the team threw their rounds so they could avoid finals tomorrow and go to winter formal. Jon and I are in for the long haul, though. I want to make his girlfriend as miserable as possible by blasting straight through the final round of debate and getting home at 10 PM tomorrow. Dan Szymkowiak, Kyle Stoneman, and Alex Rodgriguez are all on winter break, so they came and judged. It reminds me of how much more fun speech used to be.