There are many factors that go into how you should prep for the beginning of the year: the size of your squad, how much time you have, what tournament you are going to etc. For the purpose of this series I will assume the following:

1. Your squad has 2-4 people (coaches or debaters) who can reliably be counted on to produce useful debate work

2. You will be making your debut at Greenhill or a similar large TOC tournament

3. You have a decent chance of making it to the doubles (4-2 record or better)

Lets start with the neg. There are basically two ways you can go about this

1. Dedicate your time to organizing and further researching specific strategies to all the cases turned out at institutes

2. Write one or two generics

There is a tradeoff between these two approaches. With infinite time and an army of type writer monkeys there would be no tradeoff and you could do both, but realistically with 2-4 people and given that you have to also do an aff you can’t conceivably do both and keep a high level of quality.

There are quite a few reasons I think approach 2 is superior:

1. People will read new cases- especially better teams. This means that if you don’t have a quality generic you will probably be hurting.

2. People will read new twists on camp cases- see above

3. It’s hard to predict which camp cases will become common- just looking at the last few years you can see that some dominant camp cases (Afghanistan) were popular, others were unpopular at camp but became big during the year (Japan, various education affs on poverty). Case specific strategies are a gamble, you are essentially betting you will get to use the work and in order to get to use it you have to debate that case. Generics are a much safer bet in this regard.

4. Case specific strategies limit your ability to exploit MPJ. For the sake of this point I am going to assume you are well rounded enough to employ both critical and policy strategies. Case specific strategies are (for the most part) one or the other- you have a pic with a policy net benefit, or a specific K of sps deployment for example. Depending on what judge you get, one of those is going to be better for you than the other. When you factor in your judge and your opponent, one of those may be dramatically better for you. The best hyper specific K in the world isn’t going to be worth much when you draw an anti K judge against a team who is decent at frameowrk and cede the political. Similarly you may be kicking yourself when you draw a K hack like Herndon and are debating a team who is ktarded but you don’t have any hippie ammo.

I could go on, but suffice to say- prepare generics. So now that we have decided that, how do you select your generics from the plethora of arguments that were turned out by camps? Well, in order to have broad applicability you need to pick something that clashes with a part of the resolutional wording- this allows you to use topicality to establish competition. This not only makes your arguments seem more “legit”, it also means that if you end up losing competition you will at least have a T argument you can fall back on. So what words in the current space topic could establish competition for you?

This topic is tricky because it doesn’t have a clear mechanism- this is because of the exploration and/or development wording. Whereas say the poverty topic had “social services” as a clear mechanism, exploration and development are both broader than that term, and there are two of them. So while there may be great generics based on those words it will be tricky to be totally prepared based on them. This leaves us with agent based strategies about “United States”.

US generics can be subdivided into two parts- international actors, and some sort of sneaky domestic agent cp like privatization. International actors have an obvious shortcoming- most affs will have some sort of US action advantage (leadership/aerospace). The shortcoming of sneaky domestic counterplans is probably competition. So to pick between the two you should think about your skill set are you:

1. A fast/technical brute strength kind of debater- would you be good going for heg impact turns in the 2nr as the net benefit to your cp?

or

2. Are you slow/smart- better suited to debating theory nuances to win the competition for a sneaky cp?

These two aren’t mutually exclusive as some debaters, like Roy, have it all. But if you are honest with yourself you can tell which one better suits you. While I said at the beginning that I will assume you are doing work it should also be obvious that if you are less likely to cut a lot of cards/write a lot of blocks that heg bad is probably not the path for you. Once you have picked your counterplan, you need to think of a list of strategic tools you will need. For each of these you want to think not only of what does your 2NC look like, but also what will your 2NR look like? And to prepare for the tournament you should give practice speeches on both of those.

1. Competition- this is the most important part of any cp strategy. This may be as simple as just “cp avoids politics, perm links” but the more simplistic it is the easier it is for the aff to defeat it. When establishing competition you want to think of tricky add ons/disads you can read to the perm in the 2NC and you want to think about sophisticated theory arguments, hopefully buttressed by definitional support, to win the permutations that are threatening to your position are illegitimate. Being able to diversify your net benefit in the block also makes it difficult for the aff to collapse the debate. If you go for privatize with only politics as the net benefit the 1AR can push all in on “cp links” and basically ignore the rest of the debate. To have a high quality generic 2 cards on privatize doesn’t link is not going to cut it, you need to be trickier than that.

2. Solvency- you can obviously assemble solvency blocks for cases you know about, japan can do SPS, china can send people to mars etc. What is more beneficial though is to come up with solvency strategies- reasons the cp alters traditional solvency calculations so that the judge should discount aff solvency deficit arguments regardless of their case. The classic example of this is the states CP- ignore uniformity because the fiat of the CP isn’t assumed blah blah blah. These tricks are effective because they are implicitly a form of argument resolution- while asserting solvency for the CP they also give the judge a way to decide between differing solvency arguments. One example of this for the privatize CP would be to dedicate time to winning that the free market is superior to government action. So lets say the debate goes down like this

1AC: US do SPS, only the FG can dedicate resources needed for economies of scale

1NC: Privatize

2AC: private firms will never invest/returns are too uncertain, massive government program the only way

When you deal with this in the 2NC you want to go deeper than just reading “market solves” ev. One way teams have beefed up this argument on past topics is to essentially combine the CP with the “synoptic delusion” kritik, which argues that central planning is doomed to fail because of the fragmented nature of knowledge. This acts not only as offense vs the aff, its also an epistemological reason to prefer the negs cp solvency evidence over the aff cards. These tricks are great independently, but the more of them you string together the more powerful they become. So a full 2NC on this argument might look like

1. Case specific solvency cards

2. Evidence about why indicts of the market are flawed (either bias arguments or the synoptic D k discussed above)

3. Disad turns/outweighs solvency deficit arguments

4. Explanation of theory/plan spikes in the CP that moot this point

5. Defense/impact turns to this advantage

Then in the 2NR you pick 1 or 2 of these strategies and emphasize them heavily.

These tricks aren’t case specific, so you can read them every round. That also means that you can dedicate more time to practicing them, blocking them out efficiently, and finding the best evidence. For each generic, you should have 4-5 of these tricks prepared. You won’t necessarily read them all round 1, but you want some diversity and the ability to break new arguments in elims.

3. The disad- most of the time this year its going to be politics since there don’t seem to be other great topic disads, but if you chose an international actor like China than you will have a different disad like soft power. For the disad the parts you generally need to focus the most on are link tricks. You need to come up with tricky link arguments that you can use to differentiate between the plan, the cp, and the permutation. So for example “legislation costs pc” with privatize is probably not great because the process of privatization probably requires congress to act at some point. Similarly reading an Obama bad disad with domestic agent cp’s is tricky because you have to somehow win that he will get/take credit/blame for the plan but not the cp. So you need to put in some more thought than just “download thursday file”. So lets assume you select politics and privatization, you need to find links to the differences between the two, not necessarily links to the case. Many SPS links for example basically say “Giant sats are crazy and thus unpopular”. This arguably would still link to privatize. Process links will be easier to win only apply to the plan, so you need to make sure you have the best cards for these arguments in your arsenal.

So for privatize when I prepared it for a demo debate at camp, I basically put together the following links

1. GOP hates big government, prefers private involvement

2. Cost- privatize is cheaper, spending unpopular

Which are both pretty simple, but clear and easy to explain. If I was going to prepare privatize for the year I would want to have at least 4-5 arguments like that, and preferably more. Some will apply better in certain contexts than others. The costs less argument seemed silly to me for SPS because its obviously going to cost a boatload, but when I read the SPS specific evidence for that argument it was extremely good. So while I had the generic evidence, for that particular case I was able to read better specific evidence.

For each of these I would have prepared

-1NC shell

-2NC block that extends/explains earlier evidence and has best extension evidence

-2NR block that begins argument resolution, outlines key warrants, and has prewritten evidence comparison

Which would probably total about 10-15 pages per link argument. This may seem shocking to some of you, 50-75 pages of link work for a generic? The whole camp file is only 100 pages! some of the lazy readers may be saying. This is kind of my point- a well prepared generic is different from a camp generic. It is probably going to take you 2-3 weeks of 3+ hours of work a day to complete this file. So going back to our trusty phillips math, 5 pages per hour, 21 days of 3 hours of work = 315 pages of work. If your generic file is 100 pages, it may be runnable, but it is probably not win a tournament quality. Of that 315 pages I would say probably around 100 pages are “blocks”- and by blocks I mean just written analytic arguments- extensions of evidence, evidence comparisons, theory blocks etc. When extending your generics, they should be so well prepped that it doesn’t require any prep time.

In the next post I will go over your 2nd generic, which should be a K.

This is a pretty funny exchange between a debater trying to find author quals and an author pretty reasonably responding to their rudeness.

It reminded me of this classic when a debater emailed a think tank leader to ask if they had published a good card just to affect the outcome of a debate tournament. The responses from Friedman are pretty hilarious, and imo pretty dead on.

Main topic authors are often bombarded with emails from debaters/coaches. Most often they are emailed questions that could be answered with 5 seconds of googling, and often the emails are in the form of a demand, not a polite request. I have emailed many authors and so I offer some general tips for what you should do

1. Be polite.

2. Don’t say you are a debater- they don’t care. Also if you say you are a debater and then be a moron you are tainting the rep of every debater who follows you.

3. Write an intelligent email. Emailing someone and saying “you give realism cites plz? kthanxbai” is not likely to get a good response because who wants to respond to a moron. Use proper English/spelling/punctuation (in other words do as I say not as I do)

4. Explain why you are emailing them specifically-i.e. “I am emailing you after reading your article about platypus extinction in the International Journal of Platypai…”

5. Their time is valuable. If you can form questions that have short, direct, easy answers to give they are more likely to respond. If you ask an IR prof  to teach their class to you through email, they are less likely to respond.

There are many reasons politics is a popular disad on every topic, one of them is that it is generally a quick way to get to nuke war. No matter what the issue is, if its on the presidents agenda its a safe bet there will be people making hyperbolic statements about it. While most disads/advantages are always exaggerations, the impact evidence selected to read for politics is generally some of the worst.

That the evidence is bad, and more specifically that it is often biased, is an issue frequently brought up, less frequently focused on, and even less frequently a round winning issue. It should be.

Fishing for some examples I took a randoms troll through wiki town and grabbed some cards about the KORUS-FTA which has been and will be for the foreseeable future the most popular politics disad in high school and college. Some examples are more ridiculous than others, but all lend themselves to being defeated by an affirmative who aggressively pushes the bias issue.

Example 1- free trade. This impact is ludicrous- the claim being that our ability to get the free trade deal with South Korea will make or break global free trade. Before even looking at a card the empirically denied argument screams out t0 me- never had the trade deal before, have global trade. In addition the argument (prob requiring evidence) that this deal is tiny and insignificant are also round winners. The problem with these, and bias, as they are currently debated is the aff throws them out in the 2AC as blips , and the debate stops there. So in a 2AC I would phrase those two arguments like this

No Trade Impact

A. Empirically denied- global trade has progressed for decades without this deal, and the deal itself has been debated hotly for at least 5 years. There is no reason now is the key time to pass the deal or trade will collapse

B. The internal link is miniscule- South Korea is a tiny market, and the majority of liberalization is to allow easier exports into the US, an already saturated market in a country firmly in support of global trade. If trade is so sensitive to perception that failure of this deal will kill it, any number of past failures should of triggered the link- DOHA, Panama, etc.

Then I would stick to my guns and defend this argument, the neg isn’t going to just roll over. So lets move on to their card, they read the following “its key to trade” card:

CHANNEL NEWS ASIA  6 – 30 – 07
“US, SKorea set to sign free trade pact,” http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/285400/1/.html

Washington believes if the trade agreement is approved, it could trigger a wave of trade liberalization and economic reform throughout Asia, where it has such pacts only with Singapore and Australia at present.  South Korea is the seventh largest trading partner of the United States and a top military ally in Asia.  “From an economic standpoint, the potential benefits of the FTA to America’s workers, farmers, manufacturers, and service suppliers are undeniable,” deputy US Trade Representative Karan Bhatia told a Congressional hearing recently.

This card says a few things that sound impressive

-7th largest partner

-wave of liberalization

-benefits undeniable

But lets look at each of these things and deconstruct them.

“7th largest”- Seems like we already trade with them a great deal. Is this deal going to bump them up the chain somehow? Lets assume they were our 1st largest trading partner- why is that a warrant for why the deal is key to global free trade? Its not, its a totally irrelevant statistic- it in no way supports the claim that the deal is key to free trade.

“Wave of liberalization”- this comes from “washington” which means someone who supports the trade deal, so it is essentially trying to pass of a clearly biased statement as an authority. This is a perfect instance to use bias as an argument- when proponents of the trade deal make outlandish claims we should discount them. No explanation is given other than they hope it will set off a wave of liberalization- in fact it mentions that we already have made some deals in the region, why didn’t they set off this wave? This quote sounds good in isolation, but there is literally nothing to back it up.

“undeniable benefits”- there is a huge difference between benefits and key to global free trade.  Workers getting higher wages and being able to buy cheaper goods could be “undeniable benefits”, but there is no attempt made in the evidence to actually connect these benefits to the expansion of global trade. Apples are undeniably good for me, that doesn’t mean they help free trade. This statement again comes from the admin trade rep- who has a stake in the debate.

Now you don’t necessarily need to go through all of that, but to win on an evidence takeout like this you need to go through their warrants and attack them aggressively- not just keep repeating what you said earlier. This is what separates the mediocre from the good- after you make that argument in the 2AC, in the 1AR you need to respond to their evidence by attacking the specific warrants. If you do, it will be almost impossible for them to recover because they really haven’t made an argument.

Now lets look at an economy impact card

NEW YORK TIMES  7 – 1 – 07

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/business/worldbusiness/01trade.html

SEOUL, South Korea, June 30 — The United States and South Korea on Saturday signed the largest free trade deal for Washington since the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, though Democratic leaders in Congress warned that they would not approve it. The United States trade representative, Susan C. Schwab, and South Korea’s trade minister, Kim Hyun-chong, signed the deal only hours before President Bush’s “fast-track” authority to negotiate such an agreement — one that Congress must approve or reject but cannot revise — was to expire Saturday.  If approved by the legislatures of both countries, the agreement could expand trade between the countries, already worth about $79 billion a year, as much as $20 billion, according to recent estimates by United States and South Korean economists.  The deal, known as the Korean Free Trade Agreement, calls for eliminating tariffs on 95 percent of consumer and industrial products on both sides within three years. It would also help South Korea’s export-driven economy fight increasing pressure from a high-tech Japan and a low-cost China. And it would give American companies an important foothold in the thriving Northeast Asian economy, where they have steadily ceded market share to Chinese, European and Japanese competitors.  “America’s economic future depends heavily on more free trade agreements like the one we are signing today with Korea,” Ms. Schwab said at a signing ceremony in Washington.

The meat of this card is at the end, the part I italicized. Lets run it through the same kind of questioning. It clearly does not say the US economy or global economy will collapse. It says deals LIKE KORUS are key, not just KORUS itself. And again, its coming from an insider (Schwab) with a stake in the debate. So while it does have that good line “economic future depends” it is not really saying “failure of KORUS=mead 92″ which is what the neg is reading it to say.

To close, here is a bit better card than the ones we have gone through so far (which were somewhat easy, but in reality pretty typical). Post in the comments the kinds of arguments you would make/points you would bring up based on what the evidence says.

WSJ 12/6 “A Korea-U.S. Trade Deal, At Last” online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704767804576000542290721476.html

What a long, strange trip it’s been for the South Korea-U.S. free trade agreement. The two sides announced this weekend that they’ve reached a deal on revisions to the draft that was signed in 2007 but never ratified. It comes not a moment too soon, given the boost this will give to a U.S. economy stumbling its way to recovery and with tensions rising on the Korean peninsula. The saga is also a lesson to future U.S. Presidents on the importance of trade leadership. Having campaigned against the pact in 2008, President Obama rediscovered its benefits once in office. Yet by then he was forced to re-open negotiations to justify his earlier opposition. The result is a deal that is slightly better than the excellent 2007 text in some ways, but slightly worse in others. And this after a delay that has cost the U.S. global credibility on economic issues, not to mention the cost to U.S. growth. The good news is that the 2007 agreement stays mostly in place. South Korea still offers significant opening of its sheltered economy to American manufactured goods, agriculture and services. Within five years of ratification the deal will eliminate tariffs on 95% of the countries’ trade in goods, and it also clears the way for greater trade in services by, for instance, opening Korea’s banking industry. Meanwhile, some of the changes to that 2007 text are helpful. The trade in cars was the main sticking point, especially as Detroit worried about Korea’s longstanding use of technical barriers like onerous safety standards to limit imports. Negotiators have added a provision that ensures new environmental standards proposed by Seoul over the past three years won’t become de facto trade barriers. Yet some of the new auto provisions are worse than what Detroit had before. Conspicuously, Korea’s current 8% tariff on imported U.S. cars—which would have been eliminated immediately upon ratification under the 2007 deal—now will be cut in half immediately but eliminated only after five years. Compare that to the European Union’s agreement with Korea, which is signed and due to take effect next July. That deal gradually phases out Korea’s 8% car tariff over four years. That means that over the next few years Detroit will miss what would have been the advantage of zero tariffs compared to rates of 2% to 6% on EU cars, and toward the end of the five-year period tariffs on EU cars will be lower than on American cars. View Full Image Associated Press President Barack Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak The biggest mistake Mr. Obama and Democrats made was allowing one vocal lobby—Detroit and its unions—to hijack debate on a comprehensive deal covering almost all trade. Consider the main “victory” for Detroit: Korea has agreed to let America phase out its 25% tariff on pickup trucks more slowly. That will come at a stiff price to American buyers of those trucks, including many small businesses that delayed purchases during the recession. Some farmers have also become collateral damage. Seoul couldn’t walk away from re-opened talks empty-handed, and one concession it extracted is a two-year delay, to 2016, in eliminating tariffs on some U.S. pork. American pork producers are excited about any deal, but they still would have been better off under the 2007 text. Chilean pork already enjoys lower tariffs thanks to the Chile-Korea FTA and has been gaining market share. The new tariff-elimination date also falls only six months before Korea’s tariffs on EU pork will end under that deal, leaving Americans far less than the two-and-a-half years they would have had under the earlier text to get a marketing jump on their competitors. These caveats should not deter Congress from ratifying what is still an excellent deal. Mr. Obama has asked GOP House Speaker-designate John Boehner to assist in getting the pact approved, and we’re told Mr. Boehner has suggested grouping this deal together with pending agreements with Colombia and Panama in a single House vote. This would make it easier for pro-trade forces in Congress to concentrate their political capital. Mr. Boehner will bring a majority or more of his GOP Members along, but Mr. Obama will have to spend his own political capital to rebuild American public support for free trade and gain Democratic support. The President would have made more progress toward his goal of doubling American exports if he had supported this deal in 2008 and pressed it through Congress in 2009. The failure in leadership was to side with the United Auto Workers and other unions against the national interest. Those who think they’ll lose from trade always have the strongest motivation to lobby, while the consumers and businesses that benefit (such as American pickup truck buyers) are harder to organize. Every American President since Hoover in the 1920s has taken the broad view, speaking up for the many trade beneficiaries. U.S. public support for freer trade has eroded amid the recession and the lack of Presidential leadership. It is crucial for U.S. competitiveness in particular, and the world economy more broadly, that Mr. Obama and his allies make a strong and unapologetic case that trade is in the best interests of American businesses and workers.

I’m somewhat baffled by many of the debates I see lately (as well as with the decisions of other judges when I listen to them) with the strange focus on terminal impacts, both in what percentage of time is spent debating them, and then even after a lot of time is spent arguing defense to them with how large of a “risk” judges assign them. Especially with people who I have had conversations with about how to debate or adjudicate impacts who when they are then in a debate seem to disregard/not employ the views they had previously expressed.

So below the break are some thoughts on what is going wrong in these debates and in the deciding of said debates.

1. 99.9% of impacts are at best, 1 in 4. Mead, Khalilzad, Spicer, etc- none of these cards make an absolute claim “any economic decline = extinction”. This is for obvious reason- to do so would be stupid. Most authors use words like “could” or “may” to indicate that this is one possibility, albeit one they may think is likely. I can’t think of a popular impact card off the top of my head that I would say does not fit in this category. So when I hear a card like this read in a debate, I generally think to myself “1 in 4″. This is not the worst thing that can happen to your impact- in fact, a reasonable discussion of impacts is a lot easier to sound convincing on than a ridiculous one.

2. Treating terminal impacts as automatically 1 in 4 encourages more discussion of the link and internal link. This can be shown mathematically. If you assume a mead card means extinction every time, then reducing the risk of the link to 50% makes the chance of the disad overall 50%. If, however, you assume 1 in 4, than 1/2 the link = 1/8th the risk of the disad. The way debates seem to work now is you must spend a lot of time reading impact defense cards that state the obvious “not every economic decline causes war” in order to reduce the risk of the impact marginally- if you don’t, the fact that the neg has a “conceded extinction impact” means its “try or die for them” so no matter how high a percentage of your case you win, its irrelevant(for consistency I will continue to discuss as if you were aff vs a da but the same thing applies in reverse). Discussing the link and internal link is superior to debating the impact:

A. The link is the portion most related to the topic and the plan- what we are supposed to be learning about

B. Debating hegemony vs the economy divorced from a discussion of the links into those impacts is shallow and generally a waste of time. Usually each team has 1 poorly warranted laundry list impact card, and then 1 defense card that is reasonable and points out “not always” or “rarely”, an argument you don’t really need a piece of evidence for.

3. The disad turns the case is the most overrated argument in debate. I wrote a post a while ago about the difference between the “disad” turns the case and “war” turns the case and said that the disad turning the case was useful, war turns the case is not. I was wrong, they are both basically useless unless dropped. What I mean by that is I cannot remember the last time I judged a debate or heard a judge discuss a round where they decided the disad turned the case despite the aff team not dropping that argument. The reason for this is simple- most of the times its a real stretch. Failure to pass the KORUS-FTA hurts US trade leadership, which undermines the WTO, which prevents IPR protections… instability in Afghanistan. The KORUS-FTA has nothing to do with Afghanistan. Any time you spend arguing it turns the case would be better spent

A. winning your own impact

B. Attacking the case solvency

4. Link defense beats impact offense every time. Over the last year or so I have judged quite a few debates where the neg went for a single disad and some case arguments, and in the process of doing so they read 4-10 impacts to their disad, and the aff read a ton of cards reading impact defense to all of them. If the neg reads 5 add on impacts in the block, you are much more likely to win reading your 4-6 response cards on a single link defense argument and crushing on it than you are trying to keep up with all their impacts. There are at least 3 reasons for this

A. Collapse- the neg can kick any impact you have good defense on at no cost to themselves strategically, wasting your 1AR time

B. Timewise the 1AR cannot keep up tit for tat with every argument from the block- spending a ton of time on impact defense means your other arguments on the line by line will suffer, increasing the overall “risk” of the disad the neg will win. When the neg wins a very large risk of the link and has 10 impacts, no matter how mitigated they are, the impact defense is usually irrelevant unless you win an overwhelming amount of case.

C. Most impact defense is stupid in that it is a 1 sentence card that states something obvious, especially impact defense cards read in the 1AR.

5. Impact defense is the worst way to deal with affirmatives that have a lot of advantages. This should be obvious- its too big of a time investment to win too little. When an aff reads a ridiculous internal link to warming and then 20 warming impacts, just go for no internal link. The further back the chain of events you attack the more impacts you take out- its that simple. This is why you should be going for counterplans more - because counterplans are basically kick ass internal link answers. They force the aff to either zero in on a few things the CP doesn’t solve or lose.

6. Magnitude comparisons are useless unless there is actually a difference in magnitude -i.e. either your card is much better, the other team truly has a regional only conflict (with no escalation /extinction impact), or you read a card like “BW use o/w nuke war” and they only have nuke war impacts. This is because in the average debate I see each team has read 3+ extinction impacts by the final rebuttals. To make magnitude relevant you need to combine it with your impact defense, which is essentially then a probability argument- how likely is something to cause extinction- not “our extinction is bigger”.

An interesting real world discussion over a recent op ed recommending Obama announce he will not seek re-election in order to foster bipartisanship.

This was less of a problem in the bad old days, when powerful gatekeepers to the opinion industry weeded out the non-mainstream viewpoints. Of course, the best and the brightest of the mainstream had some galactically stupid ideas too. I’m not suggesting we return to that world — it’s neither possible nor desirable.

When it comes to policy debates I’m always on the side of John Stuart Mill — the best way to deal with stupid arguments is to counter them with better arguments in the public sphere. That said, there’s a serious cost to this philosophy in a world in which the stupid ideas can command the policy agenda. The opportunity cost to the inordinate amount of time that is spent swatting away these ideas is that less time is spent debating policies and ideas that have a real chance of being enacted. Furthermore, sometimes the dumbass idea just goes into hibernation among a few die-hard believers until a propitious moment arises for its zombie revival.

In the end, I think Mill still carries the day. Still, every once in a while, it sure would be nice not to have to waste the energy and the attention on stupid policy ideas.

One of the topics that was discussed in the first podcast episode of season two was the quality (or lack thereof) of most terrorism impacts. As if on cue, Charles V. Peña of The Independent Institute has written an excellent new article about the relative impact of terrorism — a card from the article is below the fold.

Terrorism is not an existential threat—their evidence is just hype.

Charles V. Peña, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Senior Fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, former Senior Fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute and Former Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project, Analyst for MSNBC television, holds an M.A. in Security Studies from George Washington University, 2010 (“Better Safe Than Sorry?,” Antiwar.com, September 30th, Available Online at http://original.antiwar.com/pena/2010/09/30/better-safe-than-sorry/print/, Accessed 10-01-2010)

In the post-9/11 world, “better safe than sorry” has become an article of faith guiding the actions we take in the name of preventing terrorism. But are we truly better safe than sorry?
To begin, the main reason so many people are willing to accept “better safe than sorry” is because they believe the consequences are too terrible to act otherwise. In other words, we should be willing to do almost anything to prevent another terrorist attack. Although another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 – which killed some 3,000 people – would be a great catastrophe and tragedy, it would not be an end-of-the-world event. As a nation, we survived 9/11, and we would (or at least we should) survive if there was another 9/11. That is not to trivialize or marginalize the people killed by the 9/11 attacks (or who would be killed in any future terrorist attacks), but it’s important to understand that terrorism is not an existential threat – otherwise, our responses are disproportionate (in magnitude or cost, or both) to the actual threat. It’s hard to be dispassionate because of the emotionalism surrounding 9/11, but here are some numbers worth considering to put “better safe than sorry” in context when it comes to terrorism. According to the Global Terrorism Database, from 1970 through 2007, there have been 1,347 terrorist incidents in the United States resulting in 3,340 fatalities (2,949 of which were on 9/11) and 2,234 injuries. That’s less than 100 fatalities per year on average (and more like 10 if you exclude 9/11 as an extraordinary event).
By way of comparison, consider these 2006 fatality statistics from the the Centers for Disease Control:
* Unintentional fall deaths: 20,853
* Motor vehicle traffic deaths: 43,646
* Unintentional poisoning deaths: 27,531
* Homicides: 18,573
* Firearms homicides: 12,791
Put another way, far more people die in a single year from other causes than have died as result of terrorism over a span of more than 35 years. Yet we have a Chicken Little attitude that the sky is falling when it comes to the potential threat of terrorism.

There are several more good cards in the article. What’s your favorite “terrorism is not an existential threat” card? Post it in the comments.

The Wake Forest Demon Deacons have updated their new “Deacon Source” page for the first time. It includes the full text of the evidence that all of their teams read at the Georgia State National Debate Tournament.

The winners of last year’s inaugural 3NR Spirit of Disclosure Award—Bronx Science’s Zack Elias & Andrew Markoff—set a new standard for comprehensive disclosure in high school policy debate. Instead of posting only the tags, citations, and first-and-last words of the evidence they read in debates, Bronx disclosed the full text of their evidence on the NDCA Wiki. While others feared that doing so would put them at a competitive disadvantage, Zack and Andrew were pioneers that racked up an impressive array of accomplishments despite raising the bar for openness and transparency. By winning the NDCA Championships, reaching the quarterfinals of the TOC, and finishing fourth in the Baker Award standings, Bronx put to rest the notion that a top-tier team can’t stay competitive using an open-source-after-the-fact model.

On the heels of Bronx’s trend-setting approach to disclosure, many teams are now considering a move to full text disclosure. At the college level, Jarrod Atchison announced today that the Demon Deacons will be participating in the Wake Forest Open Source Project beginning with this weekend’s Georgia State tournament. Atchison’s announcement outlines the scope of the project:

At the conclusion of each tournament we attend this year, JP Lacy will post the full text of all cards read by Wake Forest University debaters. In this first version of the initiative, JP will not post the theory or analytic arguments made by the debaters just the evidence.

Wake is the first squad to formalize a procedure for full text disclosure but, as Atchison notes, “the Gonzaga caselist shows that other teams are already posting full text on the college caselist.”

At the high school level, many teams have begun to post the full text of at least some of their evidence (most commonly the 1AC) on the wiki. A few teams—most notably St. Mark’s, last year’s TOC finalists—have committed to full disclosure of all of their evidence.

While many have celebrated this move toward oppenness and transparency, others have expressed fears that this degree of disclosure will promote laziness as debaters cease conducting original research and simply “steal” cards from the wiki. Even if the effect is small and some original research is replaced by “wiki research”, are the benefits of full text disclosure worth the risk? Are students better served without this “shortcut”? Or should the community seek to move toward a new norm that encourages full text disclosure?

For those teams that do choose to disclose the full text of their evidence, I have used St. Mark’s as an example of the way the additional content should be organized. Instead of keeping all affirmative and negative disclosure on a single wiki page, the team’s main wiki page should be used as a springboard with links to specific affirmative and negative pages for each tournament. Teams wishing to experiment with this model are welcome to do so; organizing pages by argument type/genre, for example, might result in a more useful set of pages.

One thing that I encourage all teams who are disclosing the full text of their evidence to do is to maintain a round-by-round list of their negative strategies on their main page. Doing so allows others who are scouting the team to do so efficiently without digging through hundreds or even thousands of cards. If they need more information about a particular argument, they can then know which tournament’s page to view in order to track it down.

So: what do you think about full text disclosure? We haven’t had a good 3NR discussion in a few months so bring your “A” game and let’s get started.

As listed on the wiki now

Carrolton- Japan BMD

Hooch- Afghan COIN

Dallas Jesuit-Japan

Damien- Japan

GBN-TNW

Ghill- Japan

Gulliver- End counter narcotics in Afghanistan

Homewood Flossmoor- Afghan COIN

Kinkaid- Korea

Lexington -Afghan COIN

Mountain Brook- Afghan PMCs

St. Francis- Korea

Westminster- Afghan COIN

Inspired by the list of camp affirmatives that was compiled by Christina Tallungan, Alex Agne of Detroit Country Day School has compiled a list of the disadvantages that were produced at this summer’s institutes. The complete list (in alphabetical order) is below the fold.

Afghan Resources (SDI)
Appeasement (Capitol, DDW, KU, Samford)
Allied Prolif (DDW, Emory, KU, SDI)
China Agression (Emory, Gzaga, KU, NU, SDI, UMich, UNT)
CMR (Berkley, Capitol, DDI, DDW, Kentucky, SDI, UMich)
Coercive Diplomacy (UMich)
CPGS (DDI)
Deterrence (Berkley, NU, Samford, SDI, UMich, UNT)
Diplomatic Focus (Berkley, UMich)
Gates (DDI, Emory)
Heg/Resolve (Berkley, Capitol, DDW, GTown, Samford)
Iran Agression (Emory, UNT)
Iran Prolif (Capitol)
Iraq Politics (DDI)
Israel (DDI, DDW, UNT)
Israel Politics (Gzaga)
Japan Air Power (UNT)
Japan Econ (Gzaga)
Japan F22′s (DDI)
Japan JASA Bad (Gzaga)
Japan Politics (DDI, GTown, UMich)
Japan Rearm (Berkley, DDI, DDW, GTown, UNT, Whitman)
Karzai Cred (Capitol, Gzaga)
Kuwait Camp Arifjan (Gzaga)
Kuwait Econ (Gzaga)
Middle East Stability (Whitman)
NATO (GTown, UNT)
Oil (UMich)
Pipeline DA (Capitol)
PMC (Berkley)
Readiness (UNT, Whitman)
Relations (Berkley, NU)
Redeployment (DDI, Samford, SDI)
Reverse Spending:
Airborne Laser (DDI, GTown)
F22′s (GTown)
Future Combat Systems (DDW, SDI)
General (Samford)
Space (Gzaga)
Russia Expansion (Gzaga)
SK Politics (DDI)
SK Prolif (UNT)
SK Rearm (DDI, DDW, UNT)
SK Withdraw (NU)
Soft Power (DDI)
Turkey Coup (DDW)
Turkey Politics (DDI)
Turkey Rearm (?)
US-Israel Relations (UMich, Whitman)
US-SK Relations (UNT)
US-Turkey Relations (Gzaga, UMich)

Politics:
Energy/Climate (DDI, DDW, GTown, KU, NU, SDI, UMich, Whitman)
Financial Reform (Berkley, GTown)
Immigration (KU, Whitman)
Jobs Bill (DDW)
SKFTA (DDI)
START (Berkley, Capitol, KU, NU, SDI, UMich, UNT)

Midterms:
Dems Good:
Climate Bill (DDW, Emory, KU, Samford, SDI, UMich)
Corporate Oversight (KU)
Crisis Response (Emory)
DADT (Emory, UMich)
Econ (UMich)
EFCA/Card Check (NU)
Free Trade (Emory)
Health Care Reform (Emory, KU, NU, SDI)
Heg (SDI)
Immigration Reform (DDW, Emory, NU, Samford, UMich, UNT)
Impeachment (KU)
Iran Strikes (SDI)
Soft Power (KU)
START (UMich)
VAT (UNT)
GOP Good:
Bipart (Emory)
Climate (SDI, UMich)
CTBT (NU)
DADT (SDI, UMich)
EFCA/Card Check (SDI)
Gridlock:
Deficits (Emory, KU, SDI)
Economy Generic (DDW, Emory, UMich)
Free Trade (Emory)
Interventionism (Emory)
Judicial Review (Emory, SDI)
Wars (SDI)
Health Care Repeal (SDI)
Heg (Emory)
Nuclear Policy (Emory, KU)
Peace Process Bad (Emory)
SKFTA (DDW, Emory)
Taxes (Emory)
VAT (UNT)

Christina Tallungan assembled a list of the camp affs available online with thier plan texts and advantages.

List_of_Camp_Affirmatives_(August)[1]

Is kicking into full gear, you can find it on their newly redesigned web page here