Week 3 Game vs. Matt Fox

[FromTheSouth]

Same judge, same time frame, Game will affirm.

Resolved: In an ordered society, the goal of maintaining that order ought to outweigh the goal of preogress when in conflict.

 

[The Roid Rage]

Topic: In an ordered society, the goal of maintaining that order ought to outweigh the goal of progress when in conflict.

These topics keep getting weirder and weirder, but the show must go on. I'm just going to give us a little jump off point to start with.


By "ordered society" I am going to assume that we are just talking about a well established society like the U.S., Canada, or England for example. What we are seeking to determine is what is more important in a crisis situation in any given "ordered society". Is it the wiser decision when disaster strikes to try and calm any panic, or get right to aiding the situation directly? I am going to try and prove that in this situation the best course of action from the start is to establish order.


Since the criteria is rather vague, and we don't know what kind of crisis we are dealing with in the country we will need to draw from hypothetical scenarios. A highly debated issue is the handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath which was a major cataclysm, 9/11 is a good example as well, and we could use a situation like the Oklahoma City Bombing to draw out conclusions. We could also branch out into crisis scenarios like "The Great Depression", or the current economic problems plaguing the U.S. at the moment. All of these are good examples of situations where the type of decision we are trying to make would be imperative.


- Let's look at Hurricane Katrina for instance. The destruction caused by the hurricane left people in panic, resulted in a total loss of order, and as a result of that created an even more dangerous environment than had existed before as people were trying to survive. I believe in a situation such as this the right course of action would be to secure the area and try to maintain the order that existed previously. Disasters such as this can turn a neighborhood into a war zone as people fend for their lives in what is left of a community. With the eventual goal of rebuilding and moving on, order must first be established to get to that point. The chaos of those events greatly threatens the livelihood of the people left to deal with the aftermath.

The Superdome was a mess, people living there at the time were committing crimes against each other while waiting to go back to their neighborhoods, the whole thing was horribly managed, and as a result they ended up having a lot of problems that could have been prevented by simply establishing order first, and trying to organize their efforts, rather than just jumping head first into a situation they weren't prepared to handle. Surrounding states, primarily Texas saw dramatic rises in their crime rates as well due to all the people fleeing New Orleans, and resorting to illegal activities to survive. Here we see that not just one area can be affected by a loss of order in a city, but that other cities, other communities suffer as well.


-9/11, a day that will live in infamy forever in American history. We have all seen video of what happened, a lot of us were watching on the news as the towers were hit, and ultimately fell. If you remember correctly Mayor Giuliani was quick to act, quick to secure the area with police and firefighters out in full force to ensure that complete pandemonium didn't continue beyond the unavoidable. As a result, many lives were saved, too few but some.

Taking control of the situation however, was the first order of business, then they were able to get to everything else that needed to be done to aid the situation. People were running in the streets, running for their lives afraid that the worst was yet to come. Panic was rampant, and New York was shaken to it's core. If the all out chaos was not remedied immediately, the efforts to help the survivors would have been severely side tracked. The powers that be had to gain order of some kind first, had to organize and strategize how they were going to address the matters at hand. That is the only kind of progress one can make in a situation of that magnitude. You must find a way first to get the human body under some kind of control so you can focus your efforts. If everyone is running around in a panic, frantically trying to figure out what to do, nothing is accomplished. It is imperative that everyone compose themselves as much as possible, get themselves in check, and move forward thinking clearly and logically.


- The Oklahoma City Bombing, another treacherous act that rocked the nation. Do you suppose that as soon as it happened, the first order of business would not be to get the situation under control of some kind. Once again you are talking about a situation where panic and devastation are immediate impacts that cause disorder and disarray. I state again, you must first make sure that people don't start going crazy and establish order so that people can gather themselves. In doing this we can more clearly and logically move forward with making progresses to alleviate the situation the best we can.

Also in this particular scenario, organizing efforts from the moment the bombing happened was a major key to catching up to and apprehending the bomber Timothy McVey. Had the authorities, rescue workers, and civilians all rushed to put out the fire so to speak, one could easily conclude that the bomber would have been able to flee to safety. However, order was establish and people were gathering information from the second everything went down, making it easier to track down the suspect. No time was wasted, no one was really sidetracked by the sheer shock and awe of the situation, they just got right down to business, and handled everything swiftly and efficiently.


- Economic Crisis. Here is a really touchy one. How does one respond to an economic crisis? What happens as a result? And how do you handle it? Well, one thing we all pretty well know is that places like housing projects, ghettos, and underdeveloped neighborhoods where the economy is poor as is the society; crime runs rampant, education suffers, gang activity flourishes, drug abuse is very common, and a the morale of it's citizens is very low as a result. This is most definitely the kind of thing where you have to establish order before you can gain any positive ground on the situation. In order for society to be productive and successful, order must be maintained, rules must be made, enforced, and upheld by the community/society. Just going in and trying to say "We are going to fix this" isn't going to help. It's a process and one that can't be hurried if it is going to be successful.

Our economic situation here in the U.S. and the way it has been handled is a prime example of not establishing or maintaining order before trying to move forward and find a solution to a problem. This whole thing has been horribly mismanaged, and it is because there is no order in our own Senate and House, worst of all our Executive branch in the President. You have a few hundred people all pulling the same problem in a million different directions, because they are all trying to serve their own interests, or the interests of their backers. No one has stepped up and said "We need to take control of this" it's been "We don't want to think about this too much, that might be work, so what we are going to do is just barrow a lot of money at ridiculous interest rates and try to spend our way out of the problem".

If any of them had any balls they would say "Look folks, we all need to cut the bullshit and get on the same page here. There are people out there suffering because the economy has been so horribly mismanaged, let's think of a cohesive plan to solve this problem" No order has been established amongst the powers that be, and they haven't done anything to stop the corruption that led to this, yet another way of avoiding order. As a result out economy has continued to fall and our unemployment rate has went up even higher just to mention a few things. This could have all been avoided by people organizing, establishing order over the situation collectively, and thinking out the best possible solution.



I think the best example I could think of is the town hall meetings that happened a while back discussing the healthcare bill that was basically already drafted and awaiting approval. There was a perfect situation were order was not maintained and as a result, no progress was made, communications were greatly struggled, and people were going crazy all over the place. Why was no one taking responsibility for any of this? Obviously, when you have no order there is no way to make progress as you need organization and strategy to create a successful operation.

In this case people couldn't even discuss one topic because the whole thing was mismanaged, no one was in control not even the politicians, and riots almost broke out is some places. In most places senators had to have police escorts and bodyguards more so than any other occasion because the whole thing was out of control. The entire purpose and premise of those meetings was defeated before they ever began because there was no order, there was no control. No progress comes from chaos and anarchy. Order must be maintained, without a strict and unforgiving chain of command chaos is inevitable.


This is all I will write for now, allowing my opponent a chance to respond.

 

[Spaceman Spif]

I secede from this debate and league, I apologize to Rage and the rest of the CLDL, but I have nothing for this debate and I've also realized while mildly entertaining to me, this is not something I want to continue with. Thank you for the opportunity though and Rage good luck to you, perhaps we will get our debate in a less structured, more emotional and random topic on these forums.

 

[The Roid Rage]

I am sorry to hear that Matt Fox. This is not the way I wanted to win, as a matter of fact I don't even look at it as a win, I don't know what to call this. I was looking forward to a good debate with you. I was unsure about the topic at first as well, but I sat down and thought about it for a while and soon what I was trying to argue made sense to me, and I figured out a way to support my argument. It is unfortunate you have decided to drop out, but at least you were honest about how you felt.

Since my opponent has declined, and offered no retort to my argument, I am going to do something that I am not sure has even been done. I am going to argue against myself. 1 more post of counter arguments to my own, or rather, other ways to look at the situation. Why? See the sig.

 

[The Roid Rage]

Let's look at Hurricane Katrina for instance. The destruction caused by the hurricane left people in panic, resulted in a total loss of order, and as a result of that created an even more dangerous environment than had existed before as people were trying to survive. I believe in a situation such as this the right course of action would be to secure the area and try to maintain the order that existed previously. Disasters such as this can turn a neighborhood into a war zone as people fend for their lives in what is left of a community. With the eventual goal of rebuilding and moving on, order must first be established to get to that point. The chaos of those events greatly threatens the livelihood of the people left to deal with the aftermath.

This is one way to look at the situation, but others might feel that order is something that must go to the way side when a cataclysm occurs, and that in said instance the first thing to do is act. Now with Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was under water making accessing the vicinity nearly impossible so they weren't able to make any progress until the waters receded. The fact that they knew it was coming in advance and did nothing still, also hindered the progress.

This is where action would have lead to order instead. It they would have acted instead of waiting for the disaster to hit, progress would have been made before anything even happened. It's likely that conditions wouldn't have been as bad, meaning that the situation that came about would have been remedied before they ever got to the point of needing to re establish any order. They had at least the luxury of knowing what was coming and when. With that luxury you have the opportunity to avoid some of the problems that can come from being caught unprepared as New Orleans was.

The Superdome was a mess, people living there at the time were committing crimes against each other while waiting to go back to their neighborhoods, the whole thing was horribly managed, and as a result they ended up having a lot of problems that could have been prevented by simply establishing order first, and trying to organize their efforts, rather than just jumping head first into a situation they weren't prepared to handle. Surrounding states, primarily Texas saw dramatic rises in their crime rates, gang activity, and homelessness as well due to all the people fleeing New Orleans, and resorting to illegal activities to survive. Here we see that not just one area can be affected by a loss of order in a city, but that other cities, other communities suffer as well.

Once again though, if you would have been thinking of aiding the situation before it's impact, you wouldn't have to deal with a lot of those problems on as large of a scale when the disaster strikes, in the aftermath, or the recovery.

9/11, a day that will live in infamy forever in American history. We have all seen video of what happened, a lot of us were watching on the news as the towers were hit, and ultimately fell. If you remember correctly Mayor Giuliani was quick to act, quick to secure the area with police and firefighters out in full force to ensure that complete pandemonium didn't continue beyond the unavoidable. As a result, many lives were saved, too few but some.

Taking control of the situation however, was the first order of business, then they were able to get to everything else that needed to be done to aid the situation. People were running in the streets, running for their lives afraid that the worst was yet to come. Panic was rampant, and New York was shaken to it's core. If the all out chaos was not remedied immediately, the efforts to help the survivors would have been severely side tracked.

The powers that be had to gain order of some kind first, had to organize and strategize how they were going to address the matters at hand. That is the only kind of progress one can make in a situation of that magnitude. You must find a way first to get the human body under some kind of control so you can focus your efforts. If everyone is running around in a panic, frantically trying to figure out what to do, nothing is accomplished. It is imperative that everyone compose themselves as much as possible, get themselves in check, and move forward thinking clearly and logically.

Here was a situation that no one saw coming, and so we can better asses the weight of both sides of the argument. Here, the people didn't just encounter a storm. This was a terrorist attack, unlike a storm you don't know if or when it's coming, or when it's ending so when it occurs this topic really does take on a lot of importance. It is arguable that instead of bringing out the troops to try and get the panic under control, no matter what, the first thing you do is go to the disaster site to try and save as many lives as possible.

Ideally you'd like to have the time to go through the affected parts of the city and try to bring about some order, but this it can be argued that this is not the situation to bide your time and go by the book. When time and action is what will determine how many live and die, many may be compelled to think that going straight to the heart of the problem is the main priority. This logic should also be applied to the example of the Oklahoma City Bombing.

Economic Crisis. Here is a really touchy one. How does one respond to an economic crisis? What happens as a result? And how do you handle it? Well, one thing we all pretty well know is that places like housing projects, ghettos, and underdeveloped neighborhoods where the economy is poor as is the society; crime runs rampant, education suffers, gang activity flourishes, drug abuse is very common, and a the morale of it's citizens is very low as a result.

This is most definitely the kind of thing where you have to establish order before you can gain any positive ground on the situation. In order for society to be productive and successful, order must be maintained, rules must be made, enforced, and upheld by the community/society. Just going in and trying to say "We are going to fix this" isn't going to help. It's a process and one that can't be hurried if it is going to be successful.

Once again this is a situation where biding your time may not be much of an option depending on the severity of the situation. If the government didn't move to action immediately to bail out the mortgage industry and the auto industry in the U.S., how much longer do you suppose they would have lasted? GM was on the verge of closing the books and the doors, and a lot of the banks were about to collapse as well. Some would argue that the Bail Out which was meant to make immediate progress was the most logical thing to do, and that time was not a luxury we had which is why this was the most logical thing to do, to try and reestablish the order and balance in the economy that was lost.

Our economic situation here in the U.S. and the way it has been handled is a prime example of not establishing or maintaining order before trying to move forward and find a solution to a problem. This whole thing has been horribly mismanaged, and it is because there is no order in our own Senate and House, worst of all our Executive branch in the President. You have a few hundred people all pulling the same problem in a million different directions, because they are all trying to serve their own interests, or the interests of their backers.

No one has stepped up and said "We need to take control of this" it's been "We don't want to think about this too much, that might be work, so what we are going to do is just barrow a lot of money at ridiculous interest rates and try to spend our way out of the problem".

If any of them had any balls they would say "Look folks, we all need to cut the bullshit and get on the same page here. There are people out there suffering because the economy has been so horribly mismanaged, let's think of a cohesive plan to solve this problem" No order has been established amongst the powers that be, and they haven't done anything to stop the corruption that led to this, yet another way of avoiding order

. As a result out economy has continued to fall and our unemployment rate has went up even higher just to mention a few things. This could have all been avoided by people organizing, establishing order over the situation collectively, and thinking out the best possible solution.

No one can deny that in-fighting in Congress has not halted progress across the board. This truth could be used to show exactly why progress must take precedence over order in a situation like this. Congress shouldn't be sitting amongst themselves nit picking over who's lobbying supporters are and are not covered on the back end in these deals, while more families are struggling, the economy is weak, unemployment is at heights we haven't seen for years, health care is a wreck, the auto industry is on one leg trying to survive, the banks are still in deep water, and the American people are enduring the brunt of all this. They need to put their ego's and their bank accounts out of the situation, and start acting, passing legislation that is going to benefit the American people, and quit wasting time trying to ride roughshod over one another.

I think the best example I could think of is the town hall meetings that happened a while back discussing the healthcare bill that was basically already drafted and awaiting approval. There was a perfect situation were order was not maintained and as a result, no progress was made, communications were greatly struggled, and people were going crazy all over the place. Why was no one taking responsibility for any of this? Obviously, when you have no order there is no way to make progress as you need organization and strategy to create a successful operation.

In this case people couldn't even discuss one topic because the whole thing was mismanaged, no one was in control not even the politicians, and riots almost broke out is some places. In most places senators had to have police escorts and bodyguards more so than any other occasion because the whole thing was out of control. The entire purpose and premise of those meetings was defeated before they ever began because there was no order, there was no control. No progress comes from chaos and anarchy. Order must be maintained, without a strict and unforgiving chain of command chaos is inevitable.

Once again here, this is an example of priorities out of whack halting progress as well. Just as said about the economic crisis over all, it can be argued that this is not the time to have wars of worlds with people trying to undermine each other in fine print. Action, and making progress is the idea and the goal. If you are bothering with anything else, than you aren't helping the situation no matter if you think you are creating order or not.

 

[Mr. TM]

Vince Russo much have booked this one, a three way, with two of the people being the same.

For Game Rage's first debate, I give him a 45, for his second, Ill give him a 39, and Matt Fox gets a 0. So Im not sure how do do this, should I even out the score, finding the average, which is like... 42, or give him his first points of 45, or give him 50 for getting like 84 points...? Ill let FTS decide, but yeah, a 45, 39, and a 0.