More fun than a barrel of novices

Actually, there really isn't anything more fun than a barrel of novices. The turn of the year usually marks the moment when I know all of their names and half of their foibles, so it was rather entertaining last night to chez 'em up on the new topic. Of course, we first had to eliminate Pip, as it took all of about three minutes for Liza to melt into a sniffling mass of dander sauce, but otherwise it was a normal sort of meeting.

The idea of eminent domain seems to be an elusive one for newbies. Or maybe it goes as far as the real point of the resolution is elusive. Simply put, the rez poses the rightness or wrongness of a paradigm shift from a traditional (and pretty much universally accepted) exercise of eminent domain for purposes of public use to a more elusive privatization of resources that will, presumably, result in a public benefit. Reading the history of US constitutional ED, one easily follows the evolution from pure public to Kelo and private. But that doesn't make this privatization of public use right or just, which is why there's so much disagreement on the relevant cases: even Kelo was 5/4. And this chasm of opinion ought to make for interesting debating, because there really is a meaningful difference of opinion on how far governments can go in exercising societal rights of property over individual rights of property.

Am I only dreaming that people will actually argue the above? The resolution, that is? It hasn't happened much yet this season, where people were arguing that non-citizens should vote and that judicial activism = judicial review. I've always been appalled at the weak writing skills instilled in the youth of America; I'm beginning to shiver and shake comparably over the weak social studies skills. Maybe we should bring back civics. Current event classes. They used to put me to sleep, but at least I understood by about fifth grade a model of the structure of society that the interceding fifty years or so hasn't been able to diminish.

Anyhow, the advice for the novices, and maybe it's the first time they've actually heard the term, was a CBA. After all, on either side we're weighing harms versus benefits, and a given side outweighs the other or it doesn't. If they can frame cases on that simple basis, they should be in good shape. Of course, I did drop some ideas like a CRT aff, but only to make them understand that there is more in heaven and earth than is known in their philosophy, to quote the Bard.

It will be interesting to discuss the same material tonight with the old folk. There are plenty of different ways you can look at the rez, although as I told the young 'uns, it's probably best to work themselves off a set of constants (ED is intrinsically ok, fair compensation means just that, public use is potentially open to all the public without barriers) and to argue the evolution to privatization after accepting these constants. That doesn't mean, of course, that all debaters will accept them. A large percentage of bad affs will, no doubt, attempt to invalidate ED on face, or on the bases of unfair compensation or even denying public use, but those are weak approaches that anyone ought to be pre-prepped against with decent blocks. For that matter, running such silliness could actually invite the topicality debates that one dreads so much, but if a debater refuses to or is incapable of understanding a resolution, the opponent has to do *something* about it, right? I love that whole T business. Back in the day we just used to call it a sucky definitional debate, when one side's defs were too whacked out for decent argument, and it was argued down much the same as it is now. But we didn't have the luxury of imperfect jargon borrowed from policy... Oh, those edenic dark ages!