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test--ignoreAns Tuna, Ceda Digest #666

Tuna writes:

>This is the old saw one hears in electoral politics. Do you 
represent your
>constituents or your preferences as to the way you think things 
should be. My
>tendency is to ram through what I want, but when I ran for this 
office I
>promised in a letter to the membership that I would consider their 
opinions,
>and would not impose my preferences on the organization if there 
was
>considerable popular resistance. I am sorry you would have done it
>differently. J. Boyle, topic committee chair, might just pick what 
for him
>seemed best and ignore the preferences of the membership, and would 
be in a
>very different situation than I am in now. 


Very nice but very non-responsive.  My post was in response to your 
*accusation* that I was involved in 'policy-bigotry' amongest other 
plots to silence those voices who wanted a non-policy topic.  Your 
digest response does nothing to either defend your original 
accusation or refute the clarification of my argument.
If you want to re-examine your post and my response, feel free.  If 
you want to re-examine your accusation, feel free.  I certainly 
wouldn't "ignore the preferences of the membership", I'd say "I 
understand you'd like to see a non-policy resolution, so I'll try to 
draft one but if it sucks and I can't do my job you ain't gonna see 
it on the ballot.  I wont create the illusion of representing you by 
giving you a peice of shit non-policy resolution.  Nope, no false 
choices coming from this end.  The only resolutions that get on this 
ballot will be good ones".  And if I wanted to be true to my 
committment to "consider their opinions, and would not impose my 
preferences on the organization if there was considerable popular 
resistance" I'd be sure not to be phony about it by putting something 
on the ballot as a gesture.  I'd rather say "I couldn't come up with 
a good non-policy resolution and neither could anybody else" then say 
"Here's the five minutes of thought I gave your opinions, I call it 
resolved: debate about values and the environment, haha fuck you and 
thanks for the votes, chumps".

The only portion of your post which has any relevance to our 
discussion is:

> I'll take the heat, but I will not
>exclude 20%+ of our schools in order to avoid criticism on this 
issue from
>those very few on the listserv who won't let this die.

I don't see how _I_ am advocating the exclusion of any percentage of 
our schools.  My advocacy is topic choice based on merit.  My 
suggestion for accomplishing that goal is to hold your evaluation of 
both policy and non-polciy resolutions to an equal level of scrutiny, 
discussion, defense, and research.  Furthermore, I advocated that if -
 after the process of examining all the potential resolutions - when 
you get ready to pick 6 you pick the best 6, not the best 5 and a 
token 6th to fulfill some weird form of affirmative action for 
resolution *types*.  If you wish to go back to the post you quoted in 
your digest, please do.  I don't care if 20% of the schools want a 
topic with the word 'ice cream' in it, if there isn't a good 
resolution with the word ice cream in it that makes it bast the 
scrutiny, discussion, defense, and research of possible resolutions 
then I don't think it's appropriate to pick a second rate resolution 
and put it in a valuable spot on the ballot JUST BEACAUSE it has the 
word ice cream in it, or JUST BEACAUSE it lacks the word should.  

According to your stance, you would put a non-policy resolution on 
the ballot just because you perceive 20% of the schools to want a non-
policy resolution, even if that resolution sucked.  If there were 
only ONE non-policy resolution that anyone came up with and it was 
terrbile you would STILL put it on the ballot as a facile gesture of 
maintaining diversity.  Why would you do that?  If a good non-policy 
resolution can't be crafted then why would you still put it on the 
ballot?  Do you understand my distinction between not AUTOMATICALLY 
*including* resolution *types* yet?  If advocates for particular 
resolution types (i.e. the mystical 20% or whatever) wish to draft a 
resolution which falls under a type and lobby for the actual 
RESOLUTION to be included, then fine! Great!  But if nobody wants to 
take up that flag, or it's only done in a shoddy way and nobody comes 
up with anything good _in comparison to the other available choices 
for the 6 slots on the ballot_, then blah - throw it away.


Joe Boyle
Graduate Assistant
Fort Hays State University
"And yes, fellow debaters, I say use your pen - writie in a 
resolution - and extend Mexico another year!"

fear.
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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