In the spirit of all the disclosure awards we plan on giving out, I’m glad to announce an award for best Wikis for teams attending the Woodward Tournament 2 weeks from now.
If you feel like your wiki can withstand the scrutiny of Bill and myself, send me an e-mail at Roy@the3nr.com with your school name and initials and Bill and I will go over the applicants during the tournament to crown a winner.
If you are an older varsity debater on your squad please encourage the younger members on your team (who might not read the3nr) to post their information on the NDCA Wiki (you can always sell them with idea of an award). Younger debaters often do not fully understand the disclosure etiquette (both on the wiki and before debates) so do what you can to encourage your younger teammates to get involved with disclosure.
At post-season tournaments, the frequency with which teams break new affirmatives increases exponentially. Unfortunately, this can be a recipe for pre-round misunderstandings and even confrontations—especially when combined with the heightened level of stress that generally accompanies debates at these tournaments. Like baseball, debate is full of unwritten rules—norms that the community generally agrees upon but which are not codified or universally understood. When an individual feels that a peer has violated one of these rules, they are often deeply offended. But what are the unwritten rules regarding disclosure of new affirmatives? And perhaps as importantly, what should they be? This post is an invitation for coaches and debaters to discuss “new aff” norms in advance of this year’s post-season tournaments. Some starting points for the discussion—including hypothetical scenarios—are below the fold.
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This year’s National Debate Tournament will be hosted later this month by the University of California-Berkeley. Seventy-eight teams from forty-four colleges and universities have qualified to be part of the field either through district qualifying tournaments or through the first- and second-round bid process. Considered by most to be the pinnacle of interscholastic policy debate, the NDT brings together the most successful debaters in the country for an extended weekend of intense competition in order to crown the national championship team.
For high school debaters with aspirations of competing in college, qualifying for the NDT is a frequent goal. But is it realistic? The popular perception is that debaters who qualify for the NDT are largely products of strong high school debate programs and expensive summer institutes that are afforded the opportunity to compete regularly at national circuit tournaments. But is that really the case?
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An increasingly popular negative strategy in high school debate over the past two seasons has centered around the multi-plank counterplan. Most often associated with Michigan State University at the college level, the multi-plank counterplan is presented as a single off-case position that includes two or more “planks” in its text. Instead of presenting multiple counterplans as separate off-case positions, in other words, the multi-plank counterplan presents them as a single argument.
Typically composed of multiple policy options aimed at solving all or part of the affirmative case while avoiding a disadvantage that links only to the plan but not the counterplan, the multi-plank counterplan is now commonplace in high-level debates and has become a potent weapon in the negative’s strategic arsenal.
Affirmative teams that fail to adapt and keep up with this negative innovation are putting themselves behind the proverbial eight ball. This article is an attempt to help affirmative debaters effectively respond to the multi-plank counterplan and construct a winning strategy to defeat it.
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While the previous two installments of the “Bad Cards” series highlighted popular but low-quality impact cards, this is not the only way that awful evidence is used in high school debates. In the third edition of the series, the issue is not the credibility of the evidence’s author or the veracity of its content so much as the context in which it was written—a blog about a high school debate topic written by a part-time coach and former debater whose goal was to improve the quality of debates about the legal system, not produce evidence to be cited in contest rounds. Debaters should discontinue their use of this evidence—the “Harrison ‘05/’06” cards—on the grounds of both fairness and education.
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Debate Ronin Malgor the Warrior and I took some time away from our lives of international intrigue in order to deliver a dropkick to the sternum of all those jabronies out there debating the K like a DA.
Malgor Warming up for the Podcast
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The purpose of CX is to ask questions that will help you win the debate, that should be pretty non controversial. However a lot of cx habits have been annoying me lately so here we go:
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While judging a debate recently where the aff read like 20 Mearshimer cards I went back to check the answers I cut back when I was in college and it turns out I don’t think they are quite as good as I thought they were at the time. So the challenge is to see if someone can find a better one. The most common Mearshimer evidence I have seen read comes from two articles from around 1995 mhere and mhere
Below the fold is one I thought was dec.
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Many of the pieces of evidence that students frequently read in debates are unquestionably terrible. Often, the desire to bolster an impact’s magnitude and raise it to extinction-level leads debaters to rely on evidence with a host of problems including but not limited to:
- evidence used to advance arguments outside its intended context;
- evidence citing unqualified, (functionally) anonymous, or even nefarious authors;
- evidence culled from (typically internet or tabloid) sources that are at best unedited and at worst contemptible;
- evidence advancing hyperbolic arguments supported by vitriolic and/or over-the-top language;
- evidence so old that it no longer makes sense given subsequent events or changes in the topic it discusses; and
- evidence which must be liberally interpreted in order for it to be used to support the desired conclusion.
The “Bad Cards” series is an attempt to highlight some of the most egregious examples of poor-quality evidence that is nonetheless commonplace in high school policy debates. It is not the author’s intention to “scold” or “shame” those who have read these pieces of evidence in the past or who will do so in the future. Instead, it is an attempt to influence the way that evidence is selected for inclusion in debate arguments by arming opposing students with the tools they need to defeat bad cards.
OVERVIEW
A common terminal impact to terrorism advantages and disadvantages, the Corsi ‘5 card is used to support the claim that terrorism is an existential threat to humanity. There are many problems with this so-called “evidence,” but the bottom line is this: it outlines a fictional account of a specific sequence of events dreamed up by a discredited and indeed contemptible author that—even if true—is not relevant in the vast majority of debates in which it is deployed.
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