Felonious burdens

Let’s list all the things I know for certain about LD theory:

[Sound of crickets]

Hmmm.

WTF put up a discussion piece entitled “A Parametrics Perspective,” which is worth reading. When the Sailors and I were originally discussing felons, we looked at a chief problem with the resolution, to wit, the broadness of the word felon. This applies equally to the Hannibal Lecters of life as to some guy convicted for DUI 20 years ago who has, for 20 years, been an exemplar member of AA. At the extremes, the burden of the aff, it would seem, would be to defend the Lecter voting right, and the burden of the neg, it would seem, would be to defend the AA member non-voting right. A meaningful debate on the subject, I contended, would instead address the middle ground between these two; while still allowing a definition of felon as one in or out of prison, for the sake of reasonable debate we should eliminate the extremes and concentrate on the mean (i.e., the middle ground between the extremes).

The Sailors looked at me as if I was nuts.

The thing is, if a resolution is a truth statement, as some contend, the affirmative must defend that truth statement, whereas the negative has to disprove the truth of that statement. (Correct me when I get any of this stuff wrong.) Depending on the wording of a resolution, often any single instance of disproof is enough, because once the statement is not true in any instance, it is therefore categorically not true, and the negative wins based on the aff’s inherent lack of total truth.

And, apparently, judges buy this logic. Which, frankly, is not bad logic, all things considered. And which, at the same time, requires little of the neg aside from getting up in the morning and showing up for the round.

The parametrics article talks about some equal burdens, and I’ll let you read the article for yourself, but it looks to me as if its conclusions are akin to what I tell my newbie parent judges when they go into their first novice rounds: make your decision based on what you would do—considering what you just heard—if you now had to act on this resolution. In this case, then, I would tell them, if they were a congressperson, how would they vote on felon voting rights, based on what they just heard. This would require, of course, that what they just heard addressed both sides of the issue, concentrating on meaningful, debatable aspects of the question (which is a fascinating one, by the way), rather than an argument at the level of argumentation (i.e., an argument about the arguing itself, rather than an argument about the content of the argument), which would lead one to no conclusions about the subject, but only to conclusions about the debate round. This is, in a word, jejune.

I doubt that we could, as a community, adapt an agreed-to theory of LD, given the number of people in the community who, when even the NFL redefines the activity, ignore that redefinition. That is, when the LD committee recently mandated values and criteria, many were the voices who said [insert raspberry sound here]. Keep in mind that this is an activity where every judge, rather than adhering to a general body of rules and practices, has a private paradigm that just applies to him or her, regardless of any standards outside that judge’s brain. Judge adaptation used to mean that you could adjust to the judge’s level of experience; judge adaptation nowadays means reading the judge’s tea leaves to find out what he or she likes, and if there’s three judges in the room, that’s a lot of tea in one session. In some cases we even allow claimants to pick their adjudicators (through MJP).

Solving this problem on the universal level, absent an unlikely agreement by the entire community, would require topic wordings that point specifically to the mean. The “on balance” or “in general” demurral would proscribe at least some approaches to resolutions that, from the getgo, inhibit true analysis of the content underlying the resolution. One way or the other, topics need to be pointed to the underlying content, and not to themselves. If all negatives have to do is run Hannibal Lecter, thus winning the round by (literally) definition, this isn’t really very interesting anymore.