We've have said more farewells than Cher, the Who and the Eagles combined

However, I like Claire's analysis of the LD-as-policy material, which she put out as separate comments, which I'll connect here.

Now that I've gotten a shout-out, I feel the need to clarify the argument I didn't quite make in my last comment. I agree that the nichification of LD is a concern, but I'm going to set that aside at first, since that's not what I was whining about.

The claim "LD is turning into policy" is substantiated in various ways, among them references to "speed, various forms of argumentation, disclosure, etc." I personally don't care about speed, or theory (except when it's rhetorical nonsense), at least not philosophically. I am concerned about the effects disclosure has on the nature of the activity in terms of what skills are learned, and specifically what skills are necessary to win a round. You said, referencing the use of evidence in rounds:

"you reach a point where the only way anyone can evaluate what you’ve said is to read the case when no one is speaking (which is why some policy rounds take forever, because they’re decided by judges after the round is over, when they finally get a chance to find out what everyone was arguing). There is a direct result of all of this, which is the creation of a cadre of judges who are capable of handling it."

Another result is that winning a round becomes more and more about advance preparation, and less and less about the ability to understand, dissect, respond to, and construct value-based arguments on the fly. I'm about to overgeneralize wildly about an activity I know very little about. The fact that policy rounds are often decided after the round by reading cases that were picked, blocked, prepped, and carded in advance (and that the skill of the round, I suppose, is in selecting and expressing the pieces of your prep work that are useful) obviates much of what I loved about LD rounds (…10 years ago). The round isn't won *in the round*, it's won after the round, which means it's really won in the library ahead of time.

Of course, advance prep and evidence are integral in LD, and I concede that the arguments made on either side in any given LD round don't vary much on a given topic. But there's a difference between adapting responses you commonly make to an opponent's particular argumentative setup, even if you're familiar with it, and spitting out blocks by rote because you knew exactly what was coming. My primary claim is that I think there's a line somewhere between Policy and LD where the nature of the skills needed to win changes with the amount of advance preparation needed in order to be competitive. *waves hands to emphasize somewhat fuzzy and difficult-substantiate conclusion*

Disclosure specifically encourages massive advance preparation. I will elide the argumentative details supporting this claim because it's obvious. I'm sure such a round is interesting and valuable for many people; I think it would bore me to tears. I loved the challenge of understanding and dissecting an argument on the fly.

(On a similar note, using evidence to support statements of fact is Good. I'm not all like "OMG EVIDENCE LIKE POLICY??!!!" I just don't want the increasing use of evidence to change the nature of an LD resolution, argument, or round, which are, fundamentally, supposed to be questions of value, to be a little cliche about it.)

That was my main argument. Since I was never one to leave well enough alone:

In my view, such a shift exacerbates structural unfairness in the activity. Yes, some schools will always have more money, more coaches, more access to resources and evidence and research, etc etc. But since disclosure makes winning be more and more exclusively about advance prep, it's more exclusively about who has the bigger tubs, which means the kids without the tubs are even more disadvantaged than before. Policy had the K to deal with this exact problem - if you didn't have a huge program to help you prep, you just *couldn't win,* so you had to do something *completely different*. I like to pretend that the solitary kid from a small program can still win an LD round against someone from Apple Valley, but this gets harder and harder if the opposition can literally practice the 1AR at higher and higher speeds (and thus higher and higher argument density) ahead of time, thanks to disclosure and a coaching staff with the time to block out. I sort of think this is what Palmer was saying in the long-ass blog post he wrote on the subject, or at least that was the take-away message I got, or at least I think it was, since it's been ages since he wrote it.

I (Menick) will add that I've always valued policy because of its research and use of evidence, which are among its main benefits to students. The benefits of LD, as CLG says, tend to be somewhere else.

And now I, too, will be somewhere else. Follow the idiocy on Twitter, #DiDeAd.