Yes I kept my promise and had no more liveblogging, or any other sort of blogging at all since the first day.

Sorry about that.

As a reward, a casual, unedited and very un-serious entry to bring the Denver chapter to a close for now.

In short, I can sum it up like so: Judged all the way to finals. Loved the final. It was the same motion we’d set at the Ithaca tournament on giving terror suspects trials in civilian courts.

I encountered my old friend GDS on day 2 or 3 or perhaps both. I thought that went away after a while? Hypothesis shot down.

Got to facilitate the coaches’ dinner meeting and was really happy that I achieved my lifelong geeky dream of chairing a meeting where a motion passed by acclimation. Double cool for being a meeting of a non-organization with no standing rules or anything like that. Very fun.

And one of my teams made it to quarterfinals, which was good.

Here are my post-USU questions:

1. What is the point of a national debating circuit? Why have it?

2. What does this machine debate produce and consume? What do we give up and what do we get?

3. Is there a place where we can find persuasive arguments without language games? Asked another way, can something even attempt to be persuasion without the context of rules, procedures, and tricks?

4. How do we best maintain a “community” that is based on some stark anti-communitarian principles?