Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 62. Sunrise is 6:50 and sunset is 5:27 for 10 hours 37 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 0.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1786, Virginia enacts the Statute for Religious Freedom authored by Thomas Jefferson.
Those who were once debaters in high school undoubtedly remember both how instructive and how enjoyable those days were. They first learned skills in argumentation (later expanded in college and professional studies); they made new friends and traveled to interesting places for competitions.
In one popular format, an Affirmative team advanced a proposal (e.g., let’s build more hydroelectric plants) and the opposing Negative team would offer disadvantages — disads — to that proposal.
Starting out, young debaters had to learn how to overcome ridiculous opposing arguments as much as serious ones. Competitive debaters are expected to answer the points the opposing side raises, so even screwy arguments need an answer.
Sometimes, the most ridiculous disads to a proposal were claims that the proposal would lead to TOTAL GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR!
And so, and so, a Negative team might offer a disad to a proposal for building more hydroelectric plants that would have these tenuous links:
(1) a town builds a hydroelectric plant, (2) the plant receives a designation as critical infrastructure, (3) the Russian Federation is known to monitor American critical infrastructure, (4) the least-competent Russian monitors work on the weekends, (5) Russians habitually get drunk on weekends, (6) the Russian monitors will get drunk, (7) drunks typically misinterpret messages about critical infrastructure, (8) the Russians’ misinterpreted communications will get to the Kremlin, (9) Vladimir Putin works in the Kremlin, (10) he works on weekends because he has no friends, (11) he relies on anything he reads, (12) he dislikes the idea of American energy independence, (13) he’s prone to threats of nuclear war, (14) if he makes enough threats he’ll act on one, (15) this will be that moment, (16) he’ll launch a TOTAL GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR, and (17) Boom!
Well, there we would be, from one hydroelectric plant to devastation in fewer than twenty steps. That’s the disad that warns you not to build a hydroelectric plant.
And yet, and yet, outside of a young debater’s tenuous links, cause and effect in the world doesn’t work this way.
I was reminded of these sorts of disads while listening to an out-of-town commenter’s remarks at the February 3 meeting of the Whitewater Common Council against a private housing development: there are trains, there are (ever so improbably) train accidents (with no evidence that those rare accidents took place in conditions like ours), but had Whitewater done a vibration impact study? an acoustical noise analysis? or a soil stability study? etc. All this was offered as if it were serious, despite the development’s long distances from the road, and the existence of similar developments across Wisconsin and America without any incidents whatever.
This parade of odd interrogatories and improbabilities is rational (in the sense of a person speaking words in the English language) but not reasonable (in the way that credible arguments must be more than statistical improbabilities and cherry-picked examples).
People are free, by policy and practice, to offer remarks at the Whitewater Common Council. Those who live in the city, however, are free (and should) disregard claims that are simply a truncated version of a high-school disad.
NBC News correspondents have a dog sledding race in the Italian Alps: