What you didn't see at today's "debate"

Here's the D.A.'s take on today's "debate." If you want to find out what happened at said event, please find yourself a more responsible news media outlet. Perhaps one that features AMS hacks posting every two minutes about minutae that will have little influence on anyone's mind.

Things not seen today:

(1) Cleavage. We're all dissapointed. Well, except myself really, but that's a personal issue involving rainbows and leather.

(2) An independent moderator. Noted AMS hack Mitch Wright moderating AMS hackbate*. Way to go guys! What happened to pandering to your favourite VFM (that's us folks) by getting UBC debate moderators. Apparently reaching out to clubs is again a buzzword, not a reality.

* hackbate = "hack + debate". Or masturbating with an axe. Which, as APalm points out, would hurt.

(3) Debate. I'm not sure who to blame on this one, so let's spread the love around.

A. The candidates? Though they seemed to know their platforms decently and were excellent in repeating them, for the most part they didn't have the guts to call out other candidates on how the platforms were insufficient or bad. Case in point: Paul Korczyk, after our correspondent Austin implied the three presidential candidates were very similar: "I'm offended to hear that implication... wait, I mean... these guys are great!"

This despite the fact that some of the platforms are legitimately different! From what I can gather, some candidates strongly oppose market housing (ideological), some want to work with the university to bring students benefit from any development (pragmatic). Wait, this did inspire some heat, between Sonia, Johannes and Jeremy in the VP Academic and University Affairs! Which brings me to...

B. The elections committee/the "debate" format? Though he'd probably prefer the suffix "lady-", I'm going to go ahead and call him Mitch Wright, debatekiller. The only time things started to get interesting (Johannes was making an anti-market housing rebuttal to Sonia's more equivocal stance, and Jeremy pointedly asked "Where have you been in the fight against this?"), Mitch - on the direction of the elections administrator - shut off the microphones and moved us back to another, much more boring, round of questions.

For Gods' sakes! Heaven forbid the candidates actually debate about something, and the audience actually get excited! When asked afterward why he stopped that, Mitch claimed that the format was designed to get all the debate fit into an hour - an admirable goal, but one that justifies keeping the event blasé and fairly useless?


(4) Joke candidates. Thanks to Kommander Keg and Water Fountain for keeping us awake during the VP Admin debate. We are saddened by the Japanization of Fyre Hydrant and wish that, if we can't have reasonable debate, we could at least have funny and insighful "serious" candidates.