I received this from a student I know, and it’s worth sharing.
I am a Public Forum debater by choice, and have had some modest success on the circuit. However, as a rising senior whose partner is graduating, I am left in a quandary.
He goes on to report that he’s been reading pretty deeply into the likes of Dworkin, Arendt, Zizek, etc. This guy’s no dummy.
Thus, I turn to LD, which is where I'd like to ask for help; I have a few questions regarding the structure and nature of LD, and regarding cases.
I’m game. I’m probably going to be wrong, but I’m still game.
What are five things you would tell every LD novice that don't relate to debate universally?
Even if you never argue them, you have to master the canon of Locke and Mill. The 2nd Treatise is the best explanation of Social Contract you can get, and On Liberty is the best defense of personal freedom.
I’m sort of lost after the first one. Judge adaptation applies to all disciplines, as does knowledge, research, etc. The key thing about LD that separates it from the other debates is the concept of value, that it is values debate. Understanding ethics, therefore, is the core. This doesn’t mean that there’s agreement about morality or law or any of that stuff, but you’ve got to know what they’re all about. And then you’ve got to argue, always, from the point of view of that value. If the V is justice, your case has to demonstrate justice or that lack thereof.
And I consider it bogus that people argue things like, there is no such thing as justice, or morality, or whatever. Perfect justice, universal morality? Maybe not (although both can be arguable). But an attempt to be more just, or more “right” or more truthful, even if we can’t achieve completeness in these abstract areas, is better than being less just, less right or less true. If there is a lesson to be learned in LD that transcends LD it is that ethics matter for your entire lifetime. They matter to the entire lifetime of the human species. Not a bad way to spend a few hours in high school, in other words.
How do impacts work?
Can I have practical impact turns? (I heard an LDer at NFLs run that conscription was key to industrial development - can I run "capitalism bad" turns against that, where the impacts are democracy, environment, and dehum?)
Simple answer is yes. An impact is, of course, merely the jargon for the result of something. So if I claim that Y is the result of X, I need to demonstrate it clearly with some link from X to Y. If you have a link from X to H, that at the very least makes my link non-unique. If you can prove that your link from X to H always happens and not my link from X to Y, then you’ve simply proven that you’re right and I’m wrong.
I’m wary of the word “turn” in debate, which is used willy nilly, usually to mean “refutation.” A turn is a very specific argument that proves that the original argument is not only false, but works for the opposite side. Half the rounds I see, every other word out of the debaters’ mouths is “turn.” To which I respond, “taint.”
How prevalent are kritiks?
How willing do you find circuit judges to vote on them, if well explained?
On the negative, can I kritik the V/VC structure?
Can I run two kritiks in the NC, one of the V/VC structure, and one of the resolution itself?
This guy is definitely gung-ho. Kritiks are a personal thing among judges. Some like them, some don’t. I don’t, particularly, because I feel that they don’t really argue the content of a resolution, and to not argue the content of a resolution would require an awfully big reason against, and I seldom hear it. Usually people run kritiks because they’re smart and they’ve read something like Nietzsche that could theoretically undermine virtually any position on any resolution, and they figure this will win them some rounds. Originally kritiks were directed by small policy programs against big policy programs, demonstrating that the smaller programs were, by default, unable to compete. The kritik was a tool to level the playing field. Interesting. Nowadays the kiritik is a tool to blitz the opponent semi-unfairly. Or at least that’s the way I see it.
You don’t see many Ks around here anymore, to tell you the truth. A few Nietzsche cases were abroad for a while, but the novelty wore off quickly. Worse, people who didn’t understand how to run the K were trying it, execrably. That is, if your case is a kritik of morals on the grounds that the ubermensch is beyond good and evil, you can’t run this for 5 minutes and then reply line by line to the aff. The ubermensch spits on the aff case, for God’s sake. Instant loss.
Judges might vote on them or not, but they’re probably the most risky strategy around. And, as I say, from my perspective they seem to have gone out of style.
Theory debate - yes or no?
Example: The ICC topic, kids that wouldnt claim to use the ICC to spike out of ICC bad turns were susceptible to claims that they utilized utopian fiat, utopian fiat bad.
Can I have policy implications? A la, "Voting aff will cause [link story] that leads to extinction, avoiding extinction is the supreme moral imperative?"
I haven’t watched many theory debates, so I’m probably the wrong person to answer this. I mean, the ICC example is pretty straightforward to me; call it theory if you want, but it’s also simply a matter of, if you didn’t use THE then you couldn’t make any claims based on THE, period. Why anyone would have run the actual ICC was beyond me, given the inherent flaws, but at the same time they would make claims from the literal protocols of the organization. Doing that was, well, dumb. Defeating it on theoretical grounds? Call it what you want. Just saying in the round some civilized version of “that was dumb” was good enough for me.
Nevertheless, I’d shake off those policy tendencies early in the game. LDers never get nuked. It’s a basic rule of thumb, while policians always get nuked. That’s how we can tell the difference between the two disciplines.
Anyone else have anything to add? This is a fun question.
2 comments:
I'd like to comment on the last question. Menick was so right in describing one of the core differences between LD and policy. In policy we've constructed a neat little world that is very different from the real one, where arguments such as "your case destroys the economy" and "that leads to nuclear war" are perfectly acceptable arguments. You never hear that in real policymaking - how often does a Congressman say "that highway bill is going to cause Israel to nuke Iran?" No one bothers to point this out, honestly, in policy, and so everyone seems to be content with the system, since it is at least self-consistent.
I loved policy when I was in high school, partly for the same reason, but lately (in my older and more mature days of nearly 20 years of age) I've become disillusioned with that fact. LD got it right in the sense that even though it's not pragmatic debate, in some ways it's a whole lot more pragmatic than policy debate is. Personal opinions about the nature of debate aside, every time I've seen a policy argument made in LD it's been pretty badly structured. The debater in question here seems to have a handle on things, but nevertheless, to make a real impact scenario seem likely, you need more time than an LD round gives you (and let's not get started on whether policy gives enough time).
As for critiques, very few policy debaters get them right, and nearly no LD debaters get it right. The only thing that comes close is, as Menick mentioned, Nietzschean arguments, but that's not really a critique, at least in the policy sense of the word. You have more leeway here, but I'd advise against running a critique unless 1) you're very familiar with the writings of the author in question and 2) you're capable of explaining that ideal in simple terms that relate to the round.
As a policy debater that became an LD coach, I started off with a number of the same questions that your student had, including the use of kritiks.
The conclusion I came to was similar to yours, but with two significant caveats: the threshold of compelling need and the value of discursive critiques.
One of the most interesting arguments I've seen about torture warrants is the argument that we shouldn't be debating it at all. From both an educational and a moral standpoint, there are solid arguments that debating that topic will actually be detrimental to the long-term moral development of our students, which (to me) is a compelling reason to write a critique of it. While this is a well-documented argument, I happen to think that the threshold for interesting and compelling critical arguments is low enough that I'm happy to listen to them when they're well presented. Kritiks that are presented badly, however, get no sympathy.
Secondly, I think we need to take a step back and seriously consider the value of kritiks of discourse in LD. I don't mean simply "don't say X" arguments, but I do think there's value to helping students regulate the language used in rounds. I got so fed up with hearing about the Holocaust that I taught my novices a simple H-Triv kritik, and had a long talk with them about when it was appropriate to talk about the Holocaust, and when it might be appropriate to run the K. I suspect it didn't get through to all of them, but it did challenge some of my students to think about that larger issue and I believe they actually gained something from learning a kritik that isn't specific to the any resolution.
Ultimately, you're exactly right to say that Ks are an individual judge thing, but I wonder if there isn't some value to keeping them around as a lesser argument. I don't want to hear Nietzsche every round, but I think there may be a more topic-specific (or round-specific) space for them to permanently hold.
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