![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foolish_m0rtalSo my literary & debating union the Washington Society competes against our rival debating union the Jefferson Society a few times a year for various debates. Out of some strange shenanigans that I don't really understand, I was one of three chosen to represent us in the humorous debate this year. I was really nervous before the debate, but we ended up winning!! Apparently my comedic style was defined as 'quirky,' whatever that means. Even though my speech isn't as funny on paper as it is aloud, I'm posting it, for my documentation as much as anyone else's.
The resolution for the debate was: Resolved, Integrity is for the weak.
We were on the opposing side of this topic. I had to tweak my speech a little because we were told which side we would be on ten minutes before the actual debate. Usually the Wash is seen as rough and rowdy as compared to the Jeff, but we actually came prepared with speeches, whereas apparently the Jeff didn't make up their arguments till after we were told our sides. Ummm, it definitely showed, i.e. we kicked their asses. Bazinga.
Okay, I timed this speech, and it should be under eight minutes: I didn't account for laughter, because I don't anticipate any. I took this debate's resolution, and I tried to make sense out of it. Integrity is for the weak, if A, then B. If you have integrity, you must be weak. In that case, the contrapositive must be true: if not B, then not A. If a person is not weak, then they are not honest. In other words, being badass is for the lying cheating bastards. Keeping that in mind, let's move forward.
As we all know, China was one of the most ruthlessly competent countries of the ancient world. They used gunpowder to kill men and then made their corpses explode into giant bursts of colourful lights because they were keen on making their battles family friendly. They routinely tortured worms to make clothes out of their excretions and their judicial system was the first to invent sunglasses, oddly enough, right after they invented hangovers. Okay, so maybe I don't know much about China. But one thing I do know about is Confucius.
Confucius emphasized filial piety and introduced state-proctored exams, and no, yeah, that's all I know about Confucious. I'm an engineer. The dude didn't do any data compression algorithms or anything that I would find important. But I did some research on this, and it turns out there IS one ancient Chinese algorithm in the Engineering library. I'll read it aloud here:
I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn.
From everywhere I heard the cry of birds.
Lempel-Ziv coding represents a departure from the classic view of a code as a mapping from a fixed set of source messages to a fixed set of codewords.
There are some other works, but those scrolls are zipped using China's own compression algorithms. Researchers are pissed because the ancient Chinese used .tar.gz instead of .zip like normal people.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about state proctored exams, and how the Chinese had to routinely cheat on these exams. These state exams were not easy. These were difficult-ass exams, not just because it took you five minutes to write down the characters of your name and your testing ID. Your hand is cramping up already. There's nothing you can do.
These questions didn't ask what I did on my summer vacation. Briefly and harmoniously describe the universe. Well, one thing I know, it hates me. I just wanted to be an accountant. Better get cracking there, Carl Sagan. Wo-de-ma.
Disclaimer, all swearing I know, I learned from Joss Whedon's Firefly and from drinking rice liquor with Professor Li. He was my neighbor in the boarding house in Tokyo. He didn't speak English, I didn't speak Chinese, and we both spoke Japanese badly. It was all gestures: he would go 'drink' and I would go 'please god no more. I can't see out of one eye.'
So let's talk about other things that apparently make you go blind. Wanking.
Women have it the worst. Everyone thinks women just wank in the shower. They can't do that. You know why? Because you can't get into that frame of mind when you're worried about wasting water. I'm a child of the nineties. I'm worried about Captain Planet just bursting in.
BOOM. "Not today, water wanker."
Godammit, Captain Planet.
But you know who else was in Captain Planet? Kwame, voiced by LeVar Burton. That guy knew he wasn't honest. We all watched him on Reading Rainbow. He'd say, "But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself." Don't take my word for it. Yeah. He was Geordi La Forge on Star Trek too. Back then, I didn't know Star Trek was fictional. That's why I'm so directionless now. I wanted to be an engineer in one of the spaceship. The day I found out Starfleet wasn't an actual military faction, I tried to kill myself with phaser, then I realised those didn't exist either. It was a really bad day.
But here's the thing about integrity and ethics, they're always talking to the engineers about it. We have technical writing classes that are supposed to help us become better writers. Well, my fanfiction has definitely improved, because that's all I do in class.
But every single semester, they shove an Ethics class in our faces. What do they think we're going to do? Do they think we're pulling some kind of Pinky and the Brain gambit?
What are we going to do tonight, Computer Engineer?
The same thing we do every night, Music major with a minor in Environmental Thought and Practice. Try to take over the world. Or barring that, the Rotunda, because it looks nice this time of year.
I think the technical writing department just watches too much Terminator. You want to talk about no integrity? The gloves are off now. Skynet. They transported a homicidal naked Arnold Schwarzenegger into the past. They're evil.
Quick poll, who here actually thinks that series is going to end well? Why do more movies keep coming out? Because they don't want to show humanity ultimately getting curb-stomped by the machines.
The last Terminator movie should be called Terminator Resolution: John Conner is Tired of These Time-Travelling Douchebags. John Connor goes back in time and defeats Skynet once and for all. But then he's bored. Maybe he tries to blend in and become one of those yuppies. But he's kind of restless, so he wakes up every morning and works out, does a thousand crunches. Prints off business cards. Goes by the name of Bateman, uh, I mean Batman.
But that's way in the future. Let's take this to a concept youth of today can understand. Let's talk about Macs. Macs seem like the paragons of integrity. They're pretty, white, alluring, and they've built up a strong and alarmingly violent following. Macs are like cocaine. Or Julie Andrews, you pick.
But Mac users are the biggest liars I have ever met. They brag about their two month battery life, but they are the first people with their laptops plugged into the wall. Not even the good adapters too, but the selfish adapters that are attached to the plug and block access to the rest of the outlets. But I don't want to stand here and make fun of Apple when, as of October 5, 2011, hardworking Americans don’t have Jobs.
So instead, let me talk to you about the kind of integrity this country is founded on, the story of our patron saint, George Washington. Legend has it that one day Washington, being the teenage delinquent that he was, took a hatchet and Freddie Kreuger-ed his dad's cherry trees. His father took him aside and said, "Do you know who has killed my beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden? Was it you?"
And Washington said, "Father, I cannot tell a lie. Hell yes."
Clearly this was something angry disenfranchised 'Generation A' youth did at that time. They were the type to go tagging with their graffiti quills after dark. You would wake up in the morning, and there would be 'You, Sirrah, Are No Gentleman' plastered across your door in beautiful English Roundhand.
Washington was the type that joined aggressive horse-and-buggy gangs that drove around on the weekend and harassed people. They didn't have mailboxes back then, so they just hit the post boys with baseball bats. They didn't have baseball either, so they just used hatchets. And then they siphoned fuel from their horses and just rolled out. Literally. It was some Mad Max shit back then, and the Second Amendment was created to help Mel Gibson types carry out vigilante justice.
This country's culture and history has been based on heroes who lied and cheated their way into greatness. That's what this great country of ours is all about. Integrity isn't for America. It's for the Communists and the Green Party.
Vote side Op.
The resolution for the debate was: Resolved, Integrity is for the weak.
We were on the opposing side of this topic. I had to tweak my speech a little because we were told which side we would be on ten minutes before the actual debate. Usually the Wash is seen as rough and rowdy as compared to the Jeff, but we actually came prepared with speeches, whereas apparently the Jeff didn't make up their arguments till after we were told our sides. Ummm, it definitely showed, i.e. we kicked their asses. Bazinga.
Okay, I timed this speech, and it should be under eight minutes: I didn't account for laughter, because I don't anticipate any. I took this debate's resolution, and I tried to make sense out of it. Integrity is for the weak, if A, then B. If you have integrity, you must be weak. In that case, the contrapositive must be true: if not B, then not A. If a person is not weak, then they are not honest. In other words, being badass is for the lying cheating bastards. Keeping that in mind, let's move forward.
As we all know, China was one of the most ruthlessly competent countries of the ancient world. They used gunpowder to kill men and then made their corpses explode into giant bursts of colourful lights because they were keen on making their battles family friendly. They routinely tortured worms to make clothes out of their excretions and their judicial system was the first to invent sunglasses, oddly enough, right after they invented hangovers. Okay, so maybe I don't know much about China. But one thing I do know about is Confucius.
Confucius emphasized filial piety and introduced state-proctored exams, and no, yeah, that's all I know about Confucious. I'm an engineer. The dude didn't do any data compression algorithms or anything that I would find important. But I did some research on this, and it turns out there IS one ancient Chinese algorithm in the Engineering library. I'll read it aloud here:
I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn.
From everywhere I heard the cry of birds.
Lempel-Ziv coding represents a departure from the classic view of a code as a mapping from a fixed set of source messages to a fixed set of codewords.
There are some other works, but those scrolls are zipped using China's own compression algorithms. Researchers are pissed because the ancient Chinese used .tar.gz instead of .zip like normal people.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about state proctored exams, and how the Chinese had to routinely cheat on these exams. These state exams were not easy. These were difficult-ass exams, not just because it took you five minutes to write down the characters of your name and your testing ID. Your hand is cramping up already. There's nothing you can do.
These questions didn't ask what I did on my summer vacation. Briefly and harmoniously describe the universe. Well, one thing I know, it hates me. I just wanted to be an accountant. Better get cracking there, Carl Sagan. Wo-de-ma.
Disclaimer, all swearing I know, I learned from Joss Whedon's Firefly and from drinking rice liquor with Professor Li. He was my neighbor in the boarding house in Tokyo. He didn't speak English, I didn't speak Chinese, and we both spoke Japanese badly. It was all gestures: he would go 'drink' and I would go 'please god no more. I can't see out of one eye.'
So let's talk about other things that apparently make you go blind. Wanking.
Women have it the worst. Everyone thinks women just wank in the shower. They can't do that. You know why? Because you can't get into that frame of mind when you're worried about wasting water. I'm a child of the nineties. I'm worried about Captain Planet just bursting in.
BOOM. "Not today, water wanker."
Godammit, Captain Planet.
But you know who else was in Captain Planet? Kwame, voiced by LeVar Burton. That guy knew he wasn't honest. We all watched him on Reading Rainbow. He'd say, "But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself." Don't take my word for it. Yeah. He was Geordi La Forge on Star Trek too. Back then, I didn't know Star Trek was fictional. That's why I'm so directionless now. I wanted to be an engineer in one of the spaceship. The day I found out Starfleet wasn't an actual military faction, I tried to kill myself with phaser, then I realised those didn't exist either. It was a really bad day.
But here's the thing about integrity and ethics, they're always talking to the engineers about it. We have technical writing classes that are supposed to help us become better writers. Well, my fanfiction has definitely improved, because that's all I do in class.
But every single semester, they shove an Ethics class in our faces. What do they think we're going to do? Do they think we're pulling some kind of Pinky and the Brain gambit?
What are we going to do tonight, Computer Engineer?
The same thing we do every night, Music major with a minor in Environmental Thought and Practice. Try to take over the world. Or barring that, the Rotunda, because it looks nice this time of year.
I think the technical writing department just watches too much Terminator. You want to talk about no integrity? The gloves are off now. Skynet. They transported a homicidal naked Arnold Schwarzenegger into the past. They're evil.
Quick poll, who here actually thinks that series is going to end well? Why do more movies keep coming out? Because they don't want to show humanity ultimately getting curb-stomped by the machines.
The last Terminator movie should be called Terminator Resolution: John Conner is Tired of These Time-Travelling Douchebags. John Connor goes back in time and defeats Skynet once and for all. But then he's bored. Maybe he tries to blend in and become one of those yuppies. But he's kind of restless, so he wakes up every morning and works out, does a thousand crunches. Prints off business cards. Goes by the name of Bateman, uh, I mean Batman.
But that's way in the future. Let's take this to a concept youth of today can understand. Let's talk about Macs. Macs seem like the paragons of integrity. They're pretty, white, alluring, and they've built up a strong and alarmingly violent following. Macs are like cocaine. Or Julie Andrews, you pick.
But Mac users are the biggest liars I have ever met. They brag about their two month battery life, but they are the first people with their laptops plugged into the wall. Not even the good adapters too, but the selfish adapters that are attached to the plug and block access to the rest of the outlets. But I don't want to stand here and make fun of Apple when, as of October 5, 2011, hardworking Americans don’t have Jobs.
So instead, let me talk to you about the kind of integrity this country is founded on, the story of our patron saint, George Washington. Legend has it that one day Washington, being the teenage delinquent that he was, took a hatchet and Freddie Kreuger-ed his dad's cherry trees. His father took him aside and said, "Do you know who has killed my beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden? Was it you?"
And Washington said, "Father, I cannot tell a lie. Hell yes."
Clearly this was something angry disenfranchised 'Generation A' youth did at that time. They were the type to go tagging with their graffiti quills after dark. You would wake up in the morning, and there would be 'You, Sirrah, Are No Gentleman' plastered across your door in beautiful English Roundhand.
Washington was the type that joined aggressive horse-and-buggy gangs that drove around on the weekend and harassed people. They didn't have mailboxes back then, so they just hit the post boys with baseball bats. They didn't have baseball either, so they just used hatchets. And then they siphoned fuel from their horses and just rolled out. Literally. It was some Mad Max shit back then, and the Second Amendment was created to help Mel Gibson types carry out vigilante justice.
This country's culture and history has been based on heroes who lied and cheated their way into greatness. That's what this great country of ours is all about. Integrity isn't for America. It's for the Communists and the Green Party.
Vote side Op.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 07:55 pm (UTC)(We're both surprised when people think we're funny, just between you and me. I mean, yes. Funny. But when the guy falls out of the chair and everyone swarms you en-masse after your debate so they can drown you in compliments concerning you verbal prowess, it tends to make one want to hide in the Delta Quadrant somewhere.)
*WOULD VOTE FOR, EVEN AS AN OTHERWISE MORAL INDIVIDUAL*
no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 08:08 pm (UTC)Or submit for publication in "the Onion".
no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-15 08:12 pm (UTC)Pretty much, if it even has swearing or such, I need to post an apologetic sidebar on that, because of my little sister.
But this is beautiful.