More speaker point improvement tips

Again, things that require very little if any practice/prep that will massively increase your points:

-have the CP text before your speech- doesn't matter if it is a 1NC or 2NC cp, if you are going to read one, have a text. It's amazing to me the number of debates I have seen recently where someone didn't have a text, then tried to wing it off the top of their head and ended up saying the opposite of what they wanted to say- esp. with advantage cps. This is a totally unforgivable error.

-When in doubt ask a question- say you and your partner are arguing about whether or not the politics disad is obama good or obama bad- just ask. Yes you may look a little foolish, but you know what looks more foolish- answering the disad the wrong way. I counted, and this year I have seen the aff answer politics the wrong way at least 11 times. The kicker here is that in 3 of those the debates, after the aff straight linked themselves to the disad, the neg went for a K anyway. I thought about whether they just wanted to go for the k or what, and it occured to me that its possibly the neg didn't know what had just happened either. Which brings me to my next point:

-Don't smoke crack.

-Don't read arguments you don't understand/won't go for, and a corollary- even if you do understand an argument, don't read it or extend it if you won't go for it when the other team drops it. I know I know, you had a certain strategy and you wanted to go for it blah blah blah, if the other team drops a disad- CHANGE YOUR STRATEGY. I saw a debate recently where a team dropped a counterplan and the other team didn't go for it. A counterplan for gods sake. If you have such time wasting crap filler arguments in your speeches that you will not go for them if dropped, don't be surprised when you are missing on points. There is a real and perceived difference between reading 8 off, each of which you are competently prepared to go for and will go for if the EV is there, and reading 8 off when everyone in the room knows you are just going to go for the cap K no matter what. Not only will a good 2AC be able to allocate time effectively, but judges will get annoyed that you wasted 80% of the debate on irrelevant crap. My time is valuable- those Duckman episodes aren't going to watch themselves.

-D-rules. If the other team presents a d-rule, make sure you make a specific attempt to on point argue it. Whether it was a morality card in the 1AC or a nuke war turns the case card at the top of the oil disad- make an explicit answer. Don't be cute or subtle. Judging debates can get taxing, by the end of a tournament the disparity in enthusiasm between the debaters and the judges is huge. I can speak with experience here as I think I can firmly say I lost more final rounds than probably anyone in debate history. What I didn't realize at the time is when a debate started at 11 at night, most of my judges had just gone through a grueling tournament getting very little sleep and working hard, and while I was all pumped up ready to go, most of them wanted to go to sleep. Slowing down and emphasizing important parts may have tipped a few of those in my favor. I see a lot of elims where things like the following happen
-the neg reads a k and a substance strategy vs a critical aff, but does not engage the morality/k components of the aff at all through the block. Ok well you have just made the 2NR impossible to win on anything other than the K
-the aff keeps going for defense on T but never answers competing interpretations
-the 2NC gives impact calc at the top of a disad, the 1AR doesn't go there, but makes some impact arguments on the case that do answer it. The 2NR says it was dropped, and the 2AR doesn't actively contest this characterization
-the 2NR accuses the 1AR of making new arguments, when in reality they were clearly in response to new block arguments, but the 2AR doesn't fight for them even though they are on a crucial make or break issue
-the 1AR drops a perm voter, while answering 5 other perm voters, 2AR fails to see the connection.

Actually I am going to stop for a second and expound on those last 2

-Challenging "newness" of arguments. When an argument is accused of being new, the debate is usually sloppy on both sides with something like this occurring
"this is a new argument, we decided our block based on the 2AC so reject this"
"It's not new, its an extension "

Not a great debate. The first statement in particularly bothers me as being so stupid as to boggle my mind but I will try to avoid going into a rant here, and just give examples of what a more complete argument would be

For the neg:
"The 1ar's link uniqueness argument is new- uniqueness debates are evidence intensive so they should have to initiate this debate in the 2AC so we have the proper time to respond. Allowing sandbagging until the 1AR unfairly disadvantages the neg as we have a sophie's choice of reading enough evidence to adequately answer the claim but under covering the rest of the debate , or not having an adequate defense of a central component of our disad."

For the Aff:
"The block radically altered the explanation and deployment of the politics disad- this legitimizes new developments of our arguments. Thier disad shell pushed the limits of what constitutes a complete argument- its insane to expect us to have to commit to making a press on every component of it in the 2AC - we would never be able to cover their crap fest of arguments that way. When they develop something and make it complete- we get the right to answer it."

For a dropped voting issue on sever perms or something
"Voting issues have to rise to the level of why is this a reason to reject the team and not the argument- this is a crucial standard to keep debates education and prevent cheap shot proliferation. Its asinine to force the 1AR to repeat this every place they made a cheap shot- that serves no educational purpose"

Dropped Value to life
"look we dropped value to life, so what- you still have to do impact comparison- their K says assuming a position of mastery over nature kills value to life- it doesn't kill the value of ALL LIFE- it kills the value of life of those who try to master and control- so who does that? The judge maybe- at most it would be every member of the government- lets be generous and assume that's 10 million people. The case still outweighs- while loss of value to life may be worse than death for those 10 million, death is still the only tangible impact for the other 6.6 billion. Even if worse comparatively, the magnitude of their value to life impact is much smaller."


Ok end of tangent, one last speaker point improvement point
-Be somewhat organized- don't lose flows, the other teams evidence etc. Judges get annoyed when debates have to stop for long periods for you to find things and that can't be good for your points. Use colored paper, piles, different desks, whatever- just try and keep stuff under control to streamline the process.

Subject /Object Dichotomy 1

Taking a page from Zizek, I would like to change the way subjective and objective are deployed (slightly) when thinking about debate arguments. I will use politics as an example here because I think it is the most prevalent example (kritiks being a close second) but basically any argument can be thought of this way.

1. Objectively good- an argument is either factually true or the evidence for it is vastly superior to evidence on the other side. Example- Global warming is real/bad, stimulus is the top priority etc.

2. Objectively Bad- Evidence is weak/not true examples- CTBT is top priority, CO2 agriculture.


Now subjective is less based on fact, and more based on execution

3. Subjectively good- CO2 agriculture- it can be won with a decent commitment of block time, some tricky cards, and preparation. Similarly the CTBT politics disad can also be won.

4. Subjectively Bad- when a good argument is debated poorly due to lack of skill, poor evidence, etc.


Why are these categories important? I think there are a few reasons

1. Confusing Objective strength with subjective strength- when there is a "good" politics disad, and by good I mean one with quality internal link evidence, it is often times a good idea to link turn and try and win based on the objective quality of your case specific link turns- fight objective with objective. However, when a politics disad is objectively bad, the opposite is true- it is much more effective to contest the internal link /uniqueness with analytics or generic arguments because those are the parts of the disad that are weakest. However, this is not the strategy most teams face. When debating a new politics disad they read their generic link turn block- plan k2 bipart, bipart k2 agenda, plan popular, pop k2 agenda etc. Now the neg reads their generic answers to these. The neg has taken an objectively bad disad and due to poor aff answers ended up in a subjectively good position- debating generic internal link theory. Why on earth would the aff do this- why would you go into a debate and resign yourself to debating popularity good/bad for the agenda as the crucial issue of the debate?

I think this happens mainly because of the insane focus on offense/defense - I have to have some kind of offense on politics. Whenever someone says that in a post round and I query them about how they can have offense without issue specific uniqueness to the random XYZ disad they usually get a blank stare on their face. The idea of winning with defense seems foreign to them. It should not be that difficult to do so. Let's look at the following chain of events

1. Neg reads politics disad- pol cap k2 Djibouti FTA
2. Aff says "Obama's top 3 priorities are stimulus, healthcare and Iraq (card), he is spending capital on all 3 (card), he will spend capital on these 3 before the FTA, therefore the link is non unique. Furthermore there is no threshold- no evidence makes a meaningful distinction between the amount of capital obama will spend on these issues and the amount he will spend on the plan- it is irrational to assume these 3 issues will leave him with the exact right amount left to do the FTA, but that the plan would spend too much".
3. The neg concedes, quits debate, drops out of high school, works as a transient mime for a period before dying due to lack of will to live.

It's not subjectively impossible to defeat this line of affirmative argument but it is very very difficult and requires a lot of prep, a lot of very specific evidence, and a lot of skill.

Generally, if you hear a new politics disad or a disad that is not one of the big agenda items you should assume it sucks. Why? Because if it was awesome more teams would of discovered it and be running it. Will there be an odd debate where someone does break a truly sweet unknown politics disad- yes. Occasionally the key cards to make a disad good aren't found on lexis or google news and so few people find them/put the pieces together. But for the most part a good rule of thumb is that if it was new, it blew.

When this is the case you should be focusing on the parts of the disad that require the most subjective skill to overcome- press them on the internal links, not adopting the objectively best strategy- using link turns.

AT: Stimulus does AE

LAT 1-16-09
Barack Obama portrays his stimulus plan as a quick jolt for the ailing economy and a "down payment" on his priorities as president. But those goals appear to be colliding in at least one key area: energy independence. The stimulus package increasingly appears unlikely to include major investments in "green infrastructure" -- the wires and rails that could deliver renewable energy to Americans' homes and help end the nation's addiction to oil -- according to alternative-energy advocates who are discussing the plans with the Obama transition team. It's a timing issue. The blueprints and, in many cases, the authority don't exist to lay miles of high-speed rail lines or to build a sprawling web of power lines to create a truly national electric grid. "Before you spend billions of dollars on new lines, you have to spend millions of dollars on design work," said Michael Moynihan, the green project director of the liberal think tank NDN in Washington, who has worked extensively on green infrastructure and the stimulus. "Nobody had been thinking about this much money [becoming available]. So the planning just has not been done." Obama spokeswoman Amy Brundage stressed the president-elect's commitment to green infrastructure earlier this week but did not disclose details. "President-elect Obama is committed to making sure we are moving forward with smart-grid projects and mass transit initiatives that will spur long-term growth in our economy," she said. Smart-grid technology includes, for example, metering systems that help consumers use less energy. "Clean energy and infrastructure are top priorities in an American Recovery and Reinvestment plan," Brundage said, "and President-elect Obama's team is working to make these essential investments to create jobs and help put our economy back on track." The U.S. now uses a series of regional power grids that make it impossible for a wind farm in Texas to send electricity to a skyscraper in New York. Advocates say that could change under a vastly expanded national grid, opening markets for wind, solar and other energy alternatives. Obama has pledged to invest in green infrastructure as part of his push to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. At a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Obama's Energy secretary nominee, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, said a nationwide grid would be "in the national interest" and said the country needed a "new way of doing business" to get it built quickly. Chu also acknowledged the biggest obstacle: determining where to put those power lines. States, municipalities and landowners have protested plans to string transmission networks through their backyards. At Chu's confirmation hearing, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) pushed the nominee to consider reducing the amount of New Jersey land currently tagged as a possible transmission corridor. Those questions probably mean that any major grid expansion would take longer -- and need to clear more hurdles -- than the Obama team would like for a stimulus plan focused on immediacy. "Getting approval to build renewable-energy transmission to bring wind and solar to market from remote areas is something where states have an interest and landowners have an interest," said Reid Detchon, executive director of the Energy Future Coalition in Washington, who has pushed for grid upgrades in the stimulus plan. "You're not going to see big transmission towers going up overnight." Advocates haven't given up on major green infrastructure investments from Congress even if they don't make the stimulus package. Grid expansion -- and regulations easing its way -- could wind up in a comprehensive energy bill this year. Transit spending could be a large piece of a new transportation bill this fall.

Please Use Stable URL's

There is nothing more annoying them when I am getting a cite, and I see someone was kind enough to include the complete web address and its like www.cnbc.com/news/usa/topstories/reporting/94584520394203423984209349258457#/editorial-johanson.html

and I type that whole thing out, spend like 5 minutes double checking that I got all the numbers right, and then it doesn't work. Sometimes its cause I screwed up, but a lot of times its because people didn't link the stable URL- it was a front page news story or something and they just cut and pasted the URL in their browser.

GET THE STABLE URL!

No Link= K Offense

The conventional wisdom of the day is that you cannot beat a k on no link- they will always win some small link to something combined with an abusive alternative... you lose.

The classic example of this that will always register in my mind is I once debated a team that said "you enshrine anthropocentrism in the law", to which we said "Um, no we don't" . They then responded "Exactly, you DON'T enshrine it in the law, and thats the link!" Trying to rap my head around how the exact opposite actions could still both link almost made it explode.

In seeing the way certain kritiks are deployed, I think "no link" can in fact be a offense by adding a small twist- hopefully some of you reading this can contribute to flushing this argument out more fully. ***

The basic premise is this: against kritiks that endorse some kind of either pluralism (there are more than one way to do/know ) or are basically plan plus (positive peace) then a well constructed affirmative can say that not only do they not link, but that the neg's paranoid attempts to force a contrived link in fact links the neg back into their own impact claims. Here is an example:

The aff says in the 1AC
-Temperature data proves warming is occuring
-warming is bad- kills fish or something

The neg says in the 1NC
-Science isn't objective
-claimed objectivity causes eradication of other ways of knowing

Normally the aff would say something like "we never claimed science was objective or the only way to know the world" and the neg would respond with a line of BS like "silence is violence" "science isn't value neutral" or "endorsing science in limited instances makes it legitimate in all instances" and then something like "our impact is extinction- the scientific approach to the world reduces us all to objects that can be eliminated" etc. etc.

A fundamental premise of the negs arg in most of these instances boils down to "bullying bad". Its bad when science bullies non scientific approaches to the world, when realism bullies feminists, when normative legal thought bullies descriptive or illustrative forms of thinking, when calculative thought bullies medatative thought etc. The idea here is that it is dangerous one one way of thinking/knowing/being/doing monopolizes the scen and pushes out other ways of knowing.

So I think the team arguing "no link" can sophisticate up thier arg by pointing out that the way the neg stretches the logic of their argument force a link is in fact the same kind of bullying their approach is indicting. It would go something like this

"No link- we never claimed science was objective, we merely said science is a way of showing that global warming is occuring, not that it is the only way. Thier paranoid search for a scientific bogeyman replicates the logic that scientific technocats use to exclude alternative perspectives- not only is science not the only way, it is not even an acceptable PART of the discussion of global warming. Voting affirmative best represents the middle ground their evidence endorses- we can agree that other forms of knoweldge are relevant while the negative will never allow even limited scientific insight a seat at the table".

Now, to make this argument go from being just good to being the bee's knees we need some kind of evidence to suppor it. And this is where you come in- maybe someone reading this can think of a good one and post it in the comments. I basically had 2 ideas for cards that could support this

-Bruckner Tears of the White Man part of this book argues that critics of the west replicate the failed logic of western superiority just in reverse- instead of the west being the light/all that is good in the world, the west is the root of all that is evil. This thought doesn't challenge the west's primacy in our conceptions of the world- it just changes the paint color.

-Zizke/Ideology- was my second idea. But that brings a lot of baggage with it/possibly links to the aff. So the best non zizek card I could think of for this is as follows

David Gray Carlson Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Columbia Law Review November, 1999

Paranoia is a strategy the subject adopts to ward off breakdown. The paranoid vision holds together the symbolic order itself and thereby prevents the subject from slipping into the psychotic state in which "the concrete 'I' loses its absolute power over the entire system of its determinations." n281 This of course means - and here is the deep irony of paraonia - that bureaucracy is the very savior of romantic metaphysics. If the romantic program were ever fulfilled - if the bureaucracy were to fold up shop and let the natural side of the subject have its way - subjectivity would soon be enveloped, smothered, and killed in the night of psychosis. n282 Paranoid ambivalence toward bureaucracy (or whatever other fantasy may be substituted for it) is very commonly observed. Most recently, conservatives "organized their enjoyment" by opposing communism. n283 By confronting and resisting an all-encompassing, sinister power, the subject confirms his existence as that which sees and resists the power. n284 As long as communism existed, conservatism could be perceived. When communism disappeared, conservatives felt "anxiety" n285 - a lack of purpose. Although they publicly opposed communism, they secretly regretted its disappearance. Within a short time, a new enemy was found to organize conservative jouissance - the cultural left. (On the left, a similar story could be told about the organizing function of racism and sexism, which, of course, have not yet disappeared.) These humble examples show that the romantic yearning for wholeness is always the opposite of [*1948] what it appears to be. n286 We paranoids need our enemies to organize our enjoyment. Paranoid construction is, in the end, a philosophical interpretation, even in the clinical cases. n287 As Schlag has perceived, the symbolic order of law is artificial. It only exists because we insist it does. We all fear that the house of cards may come crashing down. Paradoxically, it is this very "anxiety" that shores up the symbolic. The normal person knows he must keep insisting that the symbolic order exists precisely because the person knows it is a fiction. n288 The paranoid, however, assigns this role to the bureaucracy (and thereby absolves himself from the responsibility). Thus, paranoid delusion allows for the maintenance of a "cynical" distance between the paranoid subject and the realm of mad psychosis. n289 In truth, cynicism toward bureaucracy shows nothing but the unconfronted depth to which the cynic is actually committed to what ought to be abolished.

Neither of these 2 cards is quite perfect for this argument, but are the best I could think of, but you get the basic idea.

Now, the negative will clearly respond to this by saying something like "we don't stretch the link and here is some BS explanation of why you really link" so to effectively deploy this strategy you will need to be able to critically think about the things the negative has said and answer them with thought out analytic arguments instead of reading more realism inevitable cards... which means I've probably lost a lot of you.





***It should be noted that anything clear/clever/insightful in this post most likely came from John Turner with myself adding the bad jokes and obfuscating explanation.