Writing Blocks, or What Would Darwin Do?

One of the great features of Wikipedia (aside from the "random page" button, which has destroyed countless hours of my life) is the ability to view the entire history of any article. Popular articles have hundereds, even thousands of edits, and you can look at every last version if you are so inclined. If you poke around in the history of major wikipedia articles, a pattern starts to emerge: most of them started out as total crap.

Take the Empire State building, one of our country's most famous landmarks. Surely a topic worth a pretty big article in an encyclopedia, right? Here is the entire contents of Wikipedia's First Article on the subject:

A 102 story Art Deco building in New York City was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates and built in 1930. It is the tallest building in the city, and was the tallest building in the world for many years.

At 9:49 a.m. on Saturday July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber accidentally crashed into the 79th floor, where the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council were located. The fire was extinguished in 40 minutes. In the accident 14 people got killed.

That's it. Two small paragraphs, with nothing but basic information and a single factoid. It even has an inaccuracy: construction of the tower didn't finish until 1931. This article would be bad by third-grader essay standards, much less the high standards of an encyclopedia.

But look at the article today and you get something completely different: an execllent article, with sections on the tower's history, design, and significance, as well as some excellent photographs. For one person to research, write, and fact-check this article (not to mention take all the pictures) would take a paid professional the better part of a week. How did the article get so good all of a sudden?

The answer, of course, is that it wasn't "sudden" at all. This article has nearly 9 years worth of editing - thousands of revisions in all. One edit might add a new section, correct an inaccuracy, even remove vandalism like "A public observatory at the top of the building offers impressive views of your butt." There's no guarantee that any particular edit makes an improvement, but over time the article gets better and better.

This process goes by many names, but I'm a computer scientist so I'm going to call it Evolutionary Design. Instead of being built from meticulous blueprints and specifications, like the tower itself, the Empire State Building article emerged from many small design decisions, each one taking something that exists and attempting to make it just a little bit better.

Evolutionary design is a pretty crappy way of creating skyscrapers (say I go out back and build a dog house, am I any closer to building the Empire State Building?), but it's a great way to create less "physical" work: computer code, online encyclopedias, and (I'd argue) debate evidence.

Imagine you've never written a block before, or that you don't know what a block is, and I give you the assignment to "write me a block of Solvency answers to Zumbrota's Food Stamps case." Where the hell do you start? Maybe you've seen what a block looks like, but blocks have all this evidence and tags and jargon... where do you even begin? This is the problem: most Novices see a bunch of blocks before they are given the assignment to write one. It's like being given the final Empire State Building article and saying "there. Now go home and write one on the Leaning Tower of Pisa." Seeing the finished product, it's hard to imagine it's humble beginnings.

Now imagine a different assignment, something like "Zumbrota's case increases the number of people who qualify for food stamps, can you think of some reasons that might not work?"

I think that with a little bit of coaxing, your average novice debater could come up with a list that looks something like this:

1. People won't user the food stamps because there's a social stigma.


2. Food is just one expense. People also need housing, transportation, etc so they'll still be in poverty


3. People will sell their food stamps on the black market and the use the cash to buy stupid stuff

Sweet. There's a start. Copy-paste to word. Control+S. You've just made a Block, a set of arguments prepared to answer a possible opponents' position. It's incomplete, it lacks evidence and strategic vision, and it probably isn't formatted very well, but it's a start. Like that first article on the Empire State Building from 2001, it has the potential to become something great, given care and attention.

Now, though you've just gotten started, you've already done the hardest part: getting started! After taking a few seconds to mentally celebrate your first block, it's time to start revising. Maybe think of some more reasons that their plan won't work. Maybe track down the cites from Zumbrota's case and add in an indict of their evidence, maybe track down a card of your own that makes one of the points on your block, but better. There are lots of ways that you can revise your block (and I plan on discussing many of them in this guide), but the point is that you're block is never "done," only "better." Your success as a debater doesn't hinge on how good your first revision was, but rather how well you revise it, and how well you incorporate your experience into your evidence.

I can't tell you how many times I got to the end of a debate round and thought to myself "Man, our 2AC block for that argument was crap. We sure got lucky this time." Maybe 5% of the time we'd actually go back and revise the block to make it better. By the time one of us sat down to re-write the block, we'd usually long forgotten the advice the judge gave us about how to make it better. Which is sad, because modern technology has made it so easy to revise your writing. I think that our set of tools has a long way to go in supporting evolutionary design (more on that later), but we've come a long way since the days of scissors and tape. Even if you don't have a laptop, you should be making constant edits to blocks, even if scrawled on the back of the pages, of how you can make that block better. Over time, all of your little improvements (and the improvements of your teammates) can turn mediocre blocks into deadly weapons.

Credit where it's due, the idea for this post borrows heavily from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody

Cross Examination: Robots are everywhere and they eat old people's medicine for fuel

Seems like it's long overdue that I discuss Cross Examination, since it happens so early in a debate round. Novices seem to have a love-hate relationship with Cross Ex. Either you're foaming at the mouth to get in there and match wits mano-a-mano or you're absolutely terrified of getting caught with your pants down. Both predispositions have some truth to them: It's nerve-racking to have to face whatever questions come from your opponent, but it's a heck of a rush to get the chance to skewer the other team.

There's also a word of warning here for the "bring on the CX" folks. There's a distinct possibility that you have an inaccurate idea of what Cross-Ex looks like, especially if you watch a lot of Law and Order. This isn't a court room, and it's especially not a TV court room. You aren't going to get them to admit to murder, or even that their plan is a bad idea. If you do your best "Sam Waterston Gets All Angry and Wins the Case" impression, you are probably just going to look like an ass.

That's not to say that CX doesn't matter. It's a great opportunity to make yourself seem smart and your opponents seem less smart. It's a great chance to point out over-tagged cards or over-claiming authors. You can poke some critical holes in your opponents position, and get them to concede links to your arguments. The problem is, all of that takes practice. You'll have to watch a lot of rounds before you can recognize a good CX question, much less ask one. Winning in Cross-ex comes from subtelty and strategy, not from yelling until you are blue in the face.

You'll have to do crawl before you can walk, so to speak. I think that most judges evaluate CX on a sort of "level" system like you'd see in an Role-playing game or a standardized test grading rubric. Different people would rank these behaviors differently, but I think that most students progress through these stages roughly in order

• Level 1 - Fills time: Is able to ask 3 minutes worth of questions that are relevant to the other team's arguments. Questions don't go anywhere strategically relevant, but is able to keep a conversation going.


• Level 2 - Fills holes: Uses most of CX time to fill in holes in their flow. Questions sound like "What was your third answer on the Spending disad?" and don't go any further. Shows that the student is at least making an honest attempt to flow, even if they don't have a complete picture of the round.


• Level 3 - Pokes holes: Uses CX to find flaws in specific cards/arguments, but not particularly important holes. Might spend an entire cross-ex drilling their opponent about how their Uniqueness evidence is "too old" from a few months ago, but when their speech rolls around their non-uniques are just as old.


• Level 4 - Link Fishing: Asks CX questions that establish links to positions they plan on running, but aren't terribly subtle about it. "So, uh, plan spends money, right?" Shows that they are at least thinking a little bit about using CX strategically, but also that their strategic considerations are shallow.


• Level 5 - Pokes deep holes: Asks questions that expose deeper flaws in their opponent's positions: necesary trade-offs, flawed assumptions, biases that cut along multiple pieces of evidence, etc. Also, their constructives/rebuttals actually use and impact those flaws.


• Level 6 - Link Harpooning: Uncovers links, but without being clumsy and obvious about it. Opponents/Judge might not know what links they are going for. Is able to use opponents' fear of linking into arg A to link them into arg B. Uses the Reverse Pit of Doom.


• Level 7 - Yomi: From the Japanese word for "reading," as in "reading the mind of the opponent. This debater is always one step ahead. Asks the questions that their opponents are most afraid of, exposes the links that they are most vulnerale to. Is focused on winning the round, not just the 3-minute CX time. Uses the Level 5/6 behaviors along with this "reading" to gain ground on the opponent.

This list isn't meant to be a step-by-step guide, more like a thermometer. A level 7 CX is evidence of a good debater. You can't just tell yourself "OK, I'm going to start asking smart, strategic questions" because you don't know what those questions are yet. Use this list to take your own temperature on occasion... are you stuck at Level 2? Did you miss an opportunity for a Level 5 question last round? Also, when debating/watching more experienced opponents, watch for their higher-level questions, and take note of them. Maybe even steal them when the opportunity arises. Like all parts of this activity, I think that learning to appreciate a good CX question goes hand-in-hand with being good at CX yourself.

Answering Disads, or Communism was a Red Herring

Twice now I've set out to write the "answering disads" article, started on some sub-topic, decided that the sub-topic should be it's own article, and wrote it. So, for reference, you are going to want to read about turns and impact comparisons along with this post, as these are critical concepts in answering disads. Now for attempt number three.

I'm a sucker for a surprise ending, the big "oh my god" plot twist that movie critics sneer at and call a "gimmick." Warning: I am about to spoil such an event in A Beautiful Mind. You've been warned.

The movie is a biography of John Nash, who for most of the audience is "some smart guy you've never heard of." The story starts with John in college, working on some super-smart research project on a cushy scholarship. We learn that he's crazy-smart, but also kinda eccentric. He has awkward conversations with girls, follows pigeons around campus, knocks over board games when he loses, standard Hollywood-smart-nerd behavior.

So he makes friends with his roommate, awkwardly courts a wife, comes up with a sweet theory, lands a super-secret government job, has a kid, gets caught up in a communist conspiracy to overthrow America, it's a kinda-sorta-interesting movie about a smart guy, until bam. We learn he's crazy. The roommate, secret government job, and communist plot never existed. Figments of his schizophrenic imagination.

The real brilliant part of this movie is how the one pivotal scene changes the whole frame of reference of the story. We thought it was about some smart guy who makes a theory, but it's really about a man's struggle with his inner demons, with his very conception of reality.

Such is the disad. It's your plan, but with a surprise ending. The story starts out the same (plan happens), but instead of saving the world from poverty, suddenly your plan ends in an economic disaster. Through an cascading series of events, your well-intentioned plan causes some seriously nasty dominoes to fall.

The point that I am making (...eventually) is the most important part of answering disads effectively is knowing the story. What dominoes fall, how exactly do we get from plan to the impact? There are lots of ways you could possibly draw a line between social services and world war 3, so it's not enough just to know where the disad ends up.

Every link that the negative has to use to get to the impact is a liability, for two reasons. First of all, you can prove that this link is wrong (or turn it, win that the opposite happens). But what most novices forget is that you can also win by proving this link is non-unique.

Take a sample disad from last year:

• plan increases alternative energy, let's say by giving tax credits for more wind farms


• More alternative energy means that oil prices will drop because there is a wider global energy supply


• Lower oil prices ruin Russia's economy, which is very dependent on oil


• Russian economic collapse causes a collapse in the government


• Which means a terrorist acquires a nuclear weapon and uses it

Think of how many different Uniqueness claims the negative has to win: that alternative energy is not increasing now, that oil prices won't drop in the status quo, that Russia's economy is doing fine in the status quo, that Russia's government is stable, that terrorists can't get a nuclear weapon now.

They definitely didn't read cards on all of those claims in 1NC. They probably have some evidence on all of those points, but how new is it? Is it any good? Can you find better?

Also, I'm sure that a couple of those cards aren't very specific to wind farms. The "alternative energy -> oil prices drop" card is probably generic to any alternative energy, which provides you with the opportunity to either read a more specific turn (maybe wind in particular raises oil prices? unlikely, but you get my drift) or use a more specific non-unique. The neg can usually be better prepared on their disad of choice, but you should always be more prepared on the specifics of your plan.


Aside from just considering the various links in the story, you also need to think about how their story interacts with yours. If their disad ends in a US economic collapse, how does your plan affect the US economy? You might not be able to prove that your plan "solves the impact" outright, but it's probably true that the neg authors didn't consider whatever positive economic impacts your plan had when they wrote that card. At the very least, if you can win some positive economic effects then you've got a probability argument to make.


That actually leads me to another important point about evidence. 99% of all disads piece together snippets from different articles by different authors who are writing about different things. Occasionally this creates "tension" in the neg's evidence that you can exploit to cast doubt on the disad. For instance, if I sit down to write an article about how the economy is going to recover this year, I want to seem really smart and enlightened. I'm going to pad my article with "even if"s - arguments about how the economy will recover "even if" some bad stuff happens. Maybe I put in a little aside about how the market already anticipates new government spending, so new spending won't trigger a downturn in stocks.

Bam, potential link takeout, right there in the neg's evidence. That example is a little (ok, very) contrived, but pay attention to the neg's evidence and these little contradictions will start to pop out like a magic eye puzzle. They might not always be on the pages the neg reads in round (why you should always track down cites to their killer cards), and they might not be round-winners, but with a little work you can usually carve out some doubt in the neg's story.

And that's really what it's all about in the end. You wanna make your story sound believable and their sound ridiculous, made-up, dumb. Even if he was crazy, Nash still won a Nobel prize, after all.

On the subject of "The Turn"

Now onto the turn, a concept that I've mentioned a few times, but one that really ought to be given it's own article. I'm going to allow Mr. Calum Matheson to introduce the turn for me:



This snippet (a deleted scene from a debate documentary) is everything I love about debate in two minutes. Calum starts with a very dry, methodical description of what a turn is. The examples of turns, at first just for illustration's sake, become like battle scars, reminders of wars fought long ago. Notice the kid-in-a-candy-store smirk at about 1:00 when discussing the pollution turn? Calum hasn't just heard about this argument. He's given sweat and blood and tape for this argument, and he's definitely won rounds on this argument.

That's the thing about turns. Merely describing what a turn is doesn't do it justice. A link turn isn't just "winning that your plan prevents the impact," it's using your judo skills to flip the 300 pound thug straight over your head. Impact turns aren't just winning "their impact is bad," it's destroying your opponent's entire worldview, it's force-feeding them the blue pill and blowing the matrix out their butts. It's having the power to answer an argument with just about anything.

You're really only limited by what qualified authors say in published materials. That sounds rather constricting, but if there's anything that debate has taught me over the years, it's that the universe of "arguments made by smart people" is much bigger than it looks. Pretty much anything short of the blatantly offensive (holocaut denial, racism good, rape good) is fair game. Debate is about challenging assumptions: find an assumption that your opponents are not ready to defend and you've got an opportunity, a chink in their armor.

Now, just because you can argue anything from here to ridiculousness doesn't mean you should. Some students go off the deep end when it comes to counter-intuitive arguments. The reason that there's a certain badge of honor that comes with winning rounds on nuclear-war-good is because it's hard. It takes a lot of preparation, forethought, and technical skill. Just because an argument is off-the-wall doesn't mean that your opponents won't be able to think up the common-sense answers.

There's a bit of a tension here, I think, between the practical and the sexy. Say you are answering a disad that says that plan crashes the economy, which would be bad. The link turn (we help the economy) is, in most cases, the path of least resistance. You can generally be better prepared about your plan than your oppoents can, so make the debate about what your plan does. Let them leave their piles of "growth good" cards in the tub. Pragmatic. Practical. It's boring, but it's boring because it works.

And even though this article is about "offense" (as opposed to defense), it's worth noting that sometimes the right argument to make is even less sexy. Maybe you beat the disad on a non-unique, or "congress will ignore plan." You should generally have some sort of turn as part of your strategy, but you should be making arguments good enough that dropping any of them means you win, no matter how un-sexy.

Let your creativity run wild, sure. But edit. Part of being a successful debater is knowing when to be crazy and when to be boring. It usually doesn't take long in the season before you have more argument options than could fit in an 8-minute speech, so preparation will become not about what to add, but about what to take away.

Getting this eye for editing early might help you prevent the worst "everyone does it" mistake of novice debate. A link turn plus an impact turn equals a double turn, and double turns are bad. If you say, in the same round, both that plan saves the economy (link turn) and that economic growth is bad (impact turn), you've given your opponents a free disad just by conceding your arguments. Worse, it's a free disad that you don't get to answer. Remember, once your arguments are made they can't be un-made. You are stuck with this new "growth bad" disad the rest of the round.

Sounds easy enough to avoid, right? Just never run link turns and impact turns together. But when the ink starts flying it's a lot harder than it seems to keep everything consistent. And there's no guarantee that both parts of the "double turn" will happen on the same piece of paper, or in the same speech. If you aren't keeping your stories straight, a good opponent will find ways to punish you.

Now, there are ways of preventing this debacle, but all of them boil down to "know what you are doing." The biggest step you can make over your first year is to move beyond thinking of debate in terms of "their third argument on the politics disad" and start thinking in terms of the round. Strategy instead of tactics. Editing instead of just grab cards and read.

It's hard, but there's a benefit in all this. Really, debate, when done well, allows you to unlock parts of your mind you wouldn't have ever explored before. Returning to my video snippet, I love this quote:

"I love these arguments because some of them are so ludicrous, but people will think so little about them that in the end, many people are incapable of dealing with them... these are issues that one cannot discuss anywhere but in a debate"

When I die, put that on my tombstone.

I'm laying knowledge on us, predict like Nostradamus, or the Three Great Impact Comparisons

Imagine, for a moment, a hyper-simplified model of a debate round that has only two kinds of arguments: "yours" and "theirs." "Your" arguments are the arguments that you introduced, that you have well researched, and that you are used to debating. Your opponents are similarly prepared to debate "their" arguments. Let's also suppose that you and your opponents are of roughly equal debating skill.

Which arguments are you likely to win in this debate? Why, your arguments, of course. And, by extension, which arguments are your opponents likely to win? Their arguments. So, if you win all your arguments, and they win all their arguments, who should win the round?

Or, in more concrete terms, say you win that your plan saves a million impoverished people from dying of starvation, but they win that your plan will crash the US economy and cause war to break out, say between the US and China. Who wins? If a million people dying of starvation is worse than the war, then plan is a good idea, and you win, and they win if the opposite is true. The victory, in other words, goes to the team that prevents the "worse" impact.

So, what makes an impact worse than another? Arguments that answer this question are called Impact Comparisons, and these arguments are critically important in competitive debate. The "You win all your arguments, they win all their arguments" scenario doesn't often play out exactly, but some version of it does happen quite a bit, for exactly the reasons in my hypothetical scenario. Impact comparisons also focus the debate on a core concept, so if you can win an impact comparison you may be able to make a large part of the rest of the debate irrelevant.

The question that is probably burning on many minds by now is "well, how many people does the US-China war kill? Is it more than a million?" This is a magnitude comparison. For countable impacts like this, magnitude is fairly straightforward: how many die? how far does global GDP fall? For some other impacts, this can be a bit tricker: Is societal sexism worse than societal racism? Is a genocide a worse atrocity than war even if fewer people die?

Of course, magnitude is not the only thing that matters when it comes to making decisions. Say you are considering walking to the library. If you decide to go, there is a small (but real) possibility that you could get hit by a bus on your way. Getting hit by a bus has a much greater magnitude than going without the latest Harry Potter, but yet you go to the library anyway. Why? The probability of getting hit is so low that you decide it is worth the risk.

It is the same way with policymaking. Higher probability impacts are more important than lower probability impacts. Here is where a smart debater can sway a debate in their favor. You might not be able to win your link turn on the Econ Disad, but you might be able to mitigate the probability. After all, there are a lot of things that have to go wrong for a crash to lead to a war... maybe you've got evidence that the US wouldn't want to attack China. And maybe your case harms are worse than a 20% chance of war, even if fewer people die.

When comparing impacts based on magnitude and probability, it's important to note another characteristic: whether an impact is Linear or Terminal. Terminal impacts are a yes/no proposition. War either happens or it doesn't. We either get hit by an asteroid or we don't. Linear impacts have varying degrees of bad (that scale "linearly" if you were to plot them). We might be able to save all 1 million impoverished folks, or we could save 500k of them, or 100k of them, or none of them, or any amount in between.

The upshot of this is that a statement like "their impact has 50% probability" is ambiguous if I don't know much about the impact. A 50% chance of saving a million people from starvation (and probably saving 500k) looks much different than a 50% chance of a war breaking out.

In addition to magnitude and probability, the last of the "three great comparisons" is timeframe. It's an intuitive notion that a bad thing today is worse than a bad thing 100 years from now, but it might pay to reflect on why. If a policy now would cause a war in 100 years, maybe we'll figure out how to stop the war in the meantime. If plan costs a lot of money in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to save up.

For many affirmatives (especially on this year's topic), timeframe is an important weapon, because harms like poverty are happening now (they are "systemic," as some like to say). Of course, this can be taken too far. For example, people are infected with AIDS right now, with 100% certainty. But say we want to put more research money into finding a cure. The research has maybe a 10% chance of finding a cure (generous), and it might take 10 years. Suddenly your timeframe advantage is less definite. If your opponents know what they are doing, your advantage is only as short as the longest link in the chain.

The three great comparisons are powerful tools, but a few more Dos and Don'ts are in order so that you can use them most effectively.

• Comparisons aren't comparisons unless they actually Compare. Don't just tell me your war happens fast, tell me why it's fast-er than theirs.


• Most of the time, you can't win all three. Much better to tell me why the comparisons you are winning are more important than grasp at straws


• Get specific. Not all wars are created equal. A "nuclear war" between the US and Korea wouldn't be fun, but it would pale in comparison to a US-Russia nuclear conflict


• The three biggest lies in the world are: "The check is in the mail", "This might sting a little", and "Our plan results in extinction." Don't let your opponents over-claim their impacts.

The Jump to Conclusions Mat: Choosing Between Policy and LD

Since this can be something of a hot-button issue, I feel like I ought to be upfront about my background and how it might effect my lay of the land. The only form of debate that I've ever formally coached or participated in is Policy. I have watched a fair amount of LD debate as a judge, coach, and casual observer, though. Also, I will soon be marrying an LD debater/coach, and she does a pretty good job of keeping me honest (read: calling out my blatant bull-pucky).

If you've been in debate more than a few days you've probably already heard this, but it's worthwhile to point out all of the reasons that these activities are really not all that different. They are both forms of competitive debate, and (depending on where you live) there are excellent opportunities to compete in both at the Local, State, and National Level. Neither activity is considered "better," "smarter," or "harder" than the other by anyone who matters. Competing in either activity gives you the opportunity to develop speaking, researching, strategic, and critical thinking skills that is pretty much unrivaled, in my humble opinion.

So. Differences. Well, in policy you have a partner and in LD you don't. For most novices I think that this is the biggest determining factor because it's the one you best understand. You know that working with a partner can be infuriating, but it's nice having someone who's "got your back." Similarly, Working on your own means you get all the glory, but you're on your own out there. Now, these are all true, but they tend to matter a whole lot less than you think. You have to work in groups in both activities to prepare arguments, and in either activity you are going to have to pull your weight if you want to win. Most debaters tend not to stay with the same partner for long anyway as novices, so don't sweat the partner dynamics too much.

Now about the topics. The way I've always heard this is you debate "Questions of policy" in policy debate and "questions of value" in LD. This explanation tends to favor policy in most kids' minds, because most kids at least some fleeting idea of what policy means, while "value" is kind of vague. The hard part is, once you start explaining LD with words like "ethics" or "philosophy," kids get the impression that LD involves questions like "What is beauty?" and they run for the hills.

Interestingly enough, the two types of debate have covered some of the same subject matter over the years of resolutions, so I think the best way to compare and contrast the different debate styles is to look at how they approach the same topic. For example, take this pair of resolutions:

Policy Resolution (2009): The United States federal government should substantially increase social services for persons living in poverty in the United States.
LD Resolution (2008): Limiting economic inequality ought to be a more important social goal than maximizing economic freedom.

Both of these resolutions deal with the question of income inequality, but the different phrasings lead to different sets of important arguments. The LD resolution asks the general question of whether limiting inequality "ought" to be more important than economic freedom, while the policy resolution asks debaters to evaluate the merits of a particular type of action (social services) to limit inequality. The policy resolution is rooted in a particular place and time, meaning that arguments must take the present-day US into account, while arguments in the LD resolution can be somewhat disconnected from any particular society's laws or culture.

Another important difference is that the Policy resolution specifies a particular actor, IE the United States Federal Government, and the LD resolution does not. Some LD resolutions will specify an actor (though sometimes a more abstract actor, like "a just society"), but all policy resolutions will. This further constrains the debate to the limitations of that actor. Most policy debate rounds are further constrained by the particular plan the affirmative proposes, while LD debaters tend to defend/attack the "whole res."

Notice also the weighing systems in both resolutions. The LD resolution asks us to pick a "societal goal", something an entire soceity should strive toward. The policy resolution just asks us the bare "should?" This is implicitly asking: "The affirmative's plan, is it a good idea?" Now, the aff's plan might be a good idea because it meets some societal goal, but the policy resolution doesn't ask us to debate the goals themselves, at least not exclusively.

There are some other differences (time limits, how often the topic changes), but these are bad things to base a decision on, in my opinion. If you love LD debate, it's because you love debating LD resolutions. Same goes for policy. You could make policy a 1-on-1 activity with rotating bi-monthly topics, and policy debaters would still want to debate policy. They love the subject matter, not the set-up. You don't have to pick a favorite exclusively, and you definitely don't have to know right away, but you should play the game that excites you, debate the things that you feel need to be debated.

This is fuzzy, but LD debates tend towards the general case, the underlying decision-making systems. Policy debaters seek local truths, predictions of the future based on the world we live in. Remember this scene in Office Space?

Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.
Samir: So what did you say?
Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.

Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bulls*** to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean s*** up if they had a million dollars.

Samir: You know what I would do if I had a million dollars? I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds... and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities...

Michael Bolton: Samir, you're missing the point. The point of the exercise is that you're supposed to figure out what you would want to do if...
[printer starts beeping]
Michael Bolton: "PC Load Letter"? What the f*** does that mean?

Micheal is a LD debater. Samir is definitely a policy debater.

The Safety Net: an Introduction to the 2009 Policy Debate Topic

Despite the fact that the United States was founded on the premise that "all men are created equal," our economy is built in a way that makes people very "un-equal" over time. Capitalism, the only economic system the US has ever known, creates winners and losers. That's the point. My desire for fame and fortune gives me an incentive to build a better mousetrap - new business ideas, new technology - and sell that mousetrap in the market. With everyone competing, trying best to maximize their personal gain, in aggregate we all do better off.

Of course, there are some ugly realities in this system: businesses fail when they are out-done, new technology displaces existing workers, my better mousetrap can be your undoing. For the past 70 years or so, the prevailing political philosophy suggests that we should temper the ugly effects of capitalism with a "safety net:" last-resort services for the "losers" of capitalism. Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, etc. are all components of the US's safety net.

This metaphor of government social services as a "safety net" is fundamental to this year's policy debate topic. Not only is it a useful rhetorical device to justify the existence of social services, it is used throughout the literature base to refer to the concept, both positively and negatively. It pervades thinking about social services.

So much, in fact, that pretty much every possible aff on the following topic can be described as attempting to do the following two things, often in combination: (1) Make the saftey net wider so that more people are protected by it or (2) Make the safety net better so that those that it does "catch" are better protected from poverty. Though there will be plenty of attempts by affirmatives to loosen this definition, "persons living in poverty in the united states" is a fairly well-defined group, and there are only so many worthwhile things that the government can do for them.

As an effect of this, there are three "advantage areas" that will cover, I'd say, about 85% of the affirmative ground on next year's topic. First of all, you have the individual-level effects of poverty - people dying of starvation, disease, or other forms of "structural violence." Affirmatives will claim that these deaths are easily preventable with more money, so we'd be a fool not to increase spending on social services. There are also wider, societal-level effects of poverty - the relationship between poverty and crime rates, for instance, or the effects of income disparity on economic growth. Affs will argue that these societal-level effects are coming to a crisis and that we must lower poverty rates to avoid this crisis.

The final advantage area is what I'll call "philosophical" justifications (deontic, more technically speaking) for social services. Perhaps we have an obligation to provide every human being with basic necessities, or perhaps the status quo represents racist negligence of groups who are disproportionately poor. These obligations will be phrased in a bunch of different ways, but the unifying theme is that they don't depend on the consequences of social services. They come down to "We should widen the net, not because it's good for the economy (or whatever), but because it's the right thing to do."

Unfortunately, widening the net isn't free. Every dollar we spend on health care or food aid either needs to be taken from more well-off folks (in the form of taxes) or from other government programs. In case you've been living under a rock for the past year or so, it turns out that the government doesn't have piles of extra cash lying around to spend on social services. Social service spending can have beneficial effects on the economy, but these tend to be long-term. If we ruin the economy before we see the benefit, then social services would be a very poor investment. The question of what state the economy is in right now and how social services spending will effect it will be a key debate on this year's resolution.

Widening the net also has political costs. Just as our budget is constrained by a limited amount of dollars, our politicians (especially President Obama, himself an advocate of the safety net) have a limited amount of Political Capital they can use to convince congress and the public. The overarching narrative in the political press since the election is that Obama has some great opportunities for the next 4 years, but he will have to be choosy in what he decides to push. Negatives will argue that social services spending will "trade off" with other parts of the agenda. These Politics Disads are popular negative arguments every year, but this year they will be more directly addressed in the literature base, essential part of the "core of the topic."

The interesting part of the safety net metaphor is that it also feeds the philosphical arguments against the topic. Opponents of social services see a different kind of net - not a benevolent failsafe, but an ensnaring instrument of control. Thinkers from the far left and far right alike discuss the negative implications of "widening the net" and putting more people under the coercive influence of government. Government aid generally comes with many strings attached, and causes some people to become entirely dependent on the state. The safety net is essentially a compromise between capitalism and socialism, which means that purists of either economic philosophy would rather see the social net go away, either in favor of a collectivist society or a minimalist government that lets the market rule.

There's one more debate on this topic that I'd be irresponsible to ignore: the interrelationship between the Federal and State governments. The safety net is currently administered by both the national and state governments in varying levels of cooperation. The topic requires the federal government to act, which probably means taking some additional amount of control. Negatives will often advocate state-level action instead of federal action. Minnesota novices won't have to worry about the "States Counterplan" right away, but this section of the literature will filter down to the novice level through "Federalism Disads" and other arguments about the balance of power between Federal and State governments.

Answering Topicality, or How the Hell Did You Just Lose on T?

One would think that my first piece of advice about defending the Topicality of your plan is, well, pick a plan that is topical. You don't have to worry about T if your case is topical, right? There are plenty of strategic reasons to choose a case that is (mostly) Topical, but that isn't one of them. Try as you might, you can't just make T arguments go away by choosing the right plan.

To illustrate, a quick war story. My junior year of high school, the debate topic required the Aff to "substantially increase the protection of Marine Natural Resources" or something to that effect. Rosemount LR (that's me and my partner) ran a case that created Marine Protected Areas (MPAs as we called them), basically big "no boats allowed" zones in the ocean. No fishing, no exploration, nothing. The idea is that the healthy ecosystem in the MPAs can keep fish stocks up in the ocean at large.

It's a pretty topical case. That's one of the reasons we chose it, thinking "OK now we won't have to worry about Topicality." Big mistake. Early on in the year, we debated Mankato West GR, who ran a T argument that defined "Natural Resources" as "non-living materials that can be used by humans." The debate went something like this

Rosemount LR: Here's our plan, isn't it nice? It solves some harms and stuff.
Man West GR: It's not topical. Natural resources are rocks and minerals, not fish. Extra topicality is a voting issue.
Rosemount LR: But plan protects rocks too - you can't go mine minerals in the MPA either
Man West GR: But we already said that extra topicality is a voting issue. If you protect anything other than non-living resources you're extra topical.
Rosemount LR: Well, uh, that's a pretty dumb standard.

And it was, except by now it was the 1AR, waaay to late to be pointing this out. Man West GR won this debate easily. They didn't win because they had a better interpretation of the topic (could you imagine an ocean's topic where the aff can't protect fish?), they won because they were better prepared and they exploited a particular place that we were under-prepared. Their argument was bad, but it took us too long to point out the reasons that it was bad. By the time we figured out the flaw in their argument, it was too late. One would think that our "core of the topic case" would have given us the upper hand in a T debate, but our laziness was our undoing.

The point is that you need to be prepared to answer T arguments. Well, ideally you should be prepared to answer any argument, but T arguments are higher-stakes and tend to be harder to answer on the fly.

So how do you answer a Topicality argument? Well, to win a T argument, the negative has to win (1) that your plan doesn't meet their interpretation of the topic, that (2) their interpretation is a good/correct one, and (3) that T is a voting issue. If you couldn't guess, your basic options to answer Topicality are to prove any of these three things false.

First of all, you can argue that your plan meets the neg's interpretation. These arguments are usually tagged with the phrase We Meet. There's not really a whole lot to say about we meet args - Usually when the neg decides to run a T argument it's because they have an interpretation that your plan doesn't meet. That being said, there's usually some way you can spin/explain your plan so you at least have an argument as to why you meet. There are lots of ways to construct this spin, and this will largely be dependent on the specifics of the plan and violation, but there are two kinds of spin that have become popular enough that the community has bestowed on them a name.

Effects Topicality is arguing that your plan, once implemented, results in a topical action. Take a drug legalization case (a perennial example of an effects-topical case, for whatever reason). An aff could argue that legalizing drugs will cause the federal government to shift the resources it currently spends on the "war on drugs" (cops, raids, prisons) to additional treatment facilities. Since many persons living in poverty are also dealing with drug addiction, additional addiction treatment facilities would be a huge social service. Notice that the aff's plan wouldn't be "increase the number of addiction treatment facilities," but they are arguing that more facilities would be an effect of plan.

Of course, if you make an effects T answer, you are going to want to be prepared for the following arguments - that it's a slippery slope, that it makes the topic too big, that mixes burdens between "Solvency" and "Topicality", and that it decreases education about the topic. It's got a name because it's popular, and negatives are generally going to be prepared

The other classic "we meet" spin is Extra Topicality. This is the tactic that Rosemount LR tried in my story - "sure, we protect minerals too!" even though all our case advantages were about fish. Man West made the predictable answers - pretty similar to my list of reasons that effects T is bad above - and we weren't prepared to answer these in the 2AC. How easily you can seperate the "topical part" from the "not topical part" and how not-topical the not-topical-part is are both going to be factors in how easy it is to win with an extra-topical case.

Your next option is to win a Counter-Interpretation, a better interpretation of the topic. Your arguments about why your interpretation is good are going to look a lot like the negative's arguments defending their interpretation, so you might want to read my previous post on topicality. A few more things you should consider in crafting a strategy to defend your interpretation:

• You better make sure that your plan meets your interpretation, otherwise you are going to lose this debate in a hurry


• Your interpretation probably lets in a few more cases than theirs - is there anything particularly educational about this class of potential debates?


• Remember that the size of the topic is not the only question. Another important one is how easily everyone can predict the limits of the topic. An obscure interpretation might be bad just because it's obscure

Your third option is to win some type of no voter argument, that Topicality should not be a voting issue. Now, you're going to have a tough row to hoe to win that T shouldn't be a voter at all, but you've got a better chance of winning that T shouldn't be a voter in this round.

For example, maybe you aren't topical, but maybe the neg isn't really any the worse for it. If they still have access to all the important negative arguments on the topic, then the usual "fairness and education" reasons start to make less sense. Perhaps the negative needs to prove in-round abuse in order to prove that T is a voter.

A related question is how the judge should evaluate the framework debate. If the negative wins that their interpretation is better, they haven't necessarily one that the aff's interpretation is particularly bad. The aff might be able to indict the Competing interpretations framework, telling the judge "don't just vote for the best interpretation. if we prove that there is a debateable interpretation that plan is topical under, don't vote on T."

This isn't a blueprint for a round-winning 2AC T block, but it should inspire you to think the kind of thoughts necessary to stop losing so many rounds on T already.

The Fundamenals of Debate Strategy, or Ryan Battles the Pink Robots

For the purposes of this post, I am assuming that you have seen, heard, or read some piece of science fiction involving a robot. If you haven't, please close this web browser, make haste to your local library, and read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot.

The reason that I recommend I, Robot in particular is because every other piece of fiction involving a robot is really just I, Robot in disguise. Asimov's collection of stories introduces and explores the Three Laws of Robotics: a system of rules that control all robot behavior.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.


2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.


3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

You can see these principles in every Robot character written since Asimov. Every good-guy robot follows the three laws (See: Data, Autobots, C-3PO, H.E.L.P.eR, every character in WALL-E). Every bad-guy robot deliberately flaunts the three laws (See: Decepticons, the T-1000, "The Machines" in The Matrix). Every funny robot character is a satire of the three laws. From the pilot episode of Futurama:

Fry: Wait a second. You're a bender, right. We could escape if you would just bend the bars.
Bender: Dream on, skintube! I'm only programmed to bend for constructive purposes. What do I look like, a de-bender?

The great thing about the Three Laws isn't just their influence over science fiction (and real-world robotics, actually), it's how these three simple rules can create such deep, interesting worlds. Asimov uses these rules to transform unthinking mechanical men into three-dimensional, relatable characters. Testing the limits of the Three Laws opens up a world of gripping plot devices. This system of rules takes a paragraph to describe, but you could fill an entire library with the fiction and nonfiction that uses this system to do interesting things.

One of the hard things about being a novice debater is that there are just so many things to remember. Hell, I've only yet covered a handful of topics in my "Intro to Debate" series and I've already introduced over a dozen vocab words. Especially when the rubber meets the road in a round, it's daunting to remember and act on all the "dos and don'ts" that you learn in your first few weeks of debate.

Which is why I'd like to make an attempt at the organizational simplicity of the Three Laws of robotics, applied to debate. Like the Three Laws govern the entirety of robot behavior, my "Three Laws of Debate" are the fundamental basis of a debate round. None of these are written in rulebooks (that I know of), but these three principles are widely accepted norms of how a debate round ought to function. Most of the strategic advice that I have to give stems from these three principles. So without further ado, here's my stab at the Three Laws.

• An argument, once made, cannot be un-made


• A conceded argument becomes true


• No new arguments in rebuttals

Time will tell if these laws prove as powerful and influential as Asimov's (I wouldn't bet on it), but I think that they do a pretty good job setting up the logical foundation of our little game. Allow me to explain some of the implications of the Three Laws of Debate.

An argument, once made, cannot be un-made

We've all said things that we wish we could take back. In debate, just like real life, we are stuck with the consequences of what we choose to say. If the plan I advocate in my 1AC gets trounced by the negative, I can't just introduce a new plan in the 2AC. If my harms scenario gets turned by the negative (let's say that they win that Global Warming is necessary to prevent a coming Ice Age), I can't just say "never mind" and get rid of the advantage. My strategic decisions have consequences, and I must always be "responsible" for my arguments.

Of course, the mere existence of an arugment doesn't guarantee that it is in any way important or useful. Much of that depends on how my opponent reacts to that argument, leading to the second law:

A conceded argument becomes true

If you make an argument, and I concede it whether explicitly (by saying something like "I concede their argument about blah") or implicitly (by not addressing the argument at all, or "dropping" it), then you get to use that argument for whatever you want. This is the fundamental reason that speed developed as a debate strategy: If I can make so many arguments that my opponent cannot answer them all (or cannot deeply answer them all), I force them to choose which arguments to answer and which to concede. Hopefully I can get them to concede something important that I can win the round on.

Of course, concessions aren't usually that clean cut. If I concede an argument that says that the earth is warming, and you concede an argument that says that the earth is cooling, both of those statements can't simultaneously be true. We're stuck having to debate out the relative merits of those arguments. Also, the strength of the conceded argument matters in determining how important the concession is. Conceding a one-line claim-without-warrant that my plan will crash the economy carries much less weight than conceding a well-warranted piece of evidence that my plan will crash the economy. There are different amounts of "true," in other words.

The second law creates an incentive to make as many arguments as possible, but this incentive is checked by the third law,

No new arguments in rebuttals

The classical formulation of this argument is that "Constructive" speeches are for making new arguments and "Rebuttals" are for discussing/evaluating/rebutting arguments that have already been made. Actually, I think that the law is better viewed as a contiuum, where arguments must get "less new" as the debate goes on.

One of the few types that most judges will unashamedly "intervene" against are new 2AR arguments. The rationale is pretty simple: the Negative has no chance to respond, so 2AR arguments are obviously unfair. Progressing backwards through the debate, the 2NR can make new arguments, but all the 2AR generally has to do to defeat them is point out that they are new. The 1AR can usually only make new arguments in response to new arguments in the block. The block can generally make new arguments, though new Topicality arguments are generally frowned upon. The 2AC can do pretty much anything except run a new plan, and the 1AC and 1NC are wide open.

Now, I'm attempting to make a generalization here of what is allowable in each speech, so obviously there are exceptions and caveats, but the point that I am trying to make is that there is a general consensus in the community that arguments must become "less new" as the debate goes on.

My goal for my remaining articles on Strategy is to show, whenver possible, how my random bits of advice are connected to one or more of the three laws. The great experiment of these laws hinges on my ability to do so naturally, and without adding any laws. Like I said, I'm hoping for success but I'm not yet ready to bet on it.

Disads and Diseases

Tuberculosis is seen in the western world as a matter of history: a deadly foe vanquished by modern science, right there next to polio, rubella, and those other weird things they vaccinate you for as a little kid. In the developing world, however, Tuberculosis is a matter of life and death. It kills more than a million people a year, and it's no picnic for over 10 million others who have an active case. TB also has the nasty tendency to co-infect AIDS sufferers, becoming a leading cause of death for people with AIDS.

Unlike, AIDS, however, TB is treatable and curable. Aside from some rare drug-resistant strains, antibiotics do an excellent job eradicating the disease. There's a reason we don't see much of it in the developed world, after all. Most countries stricken by TB have the minimum level of healthcare infrastructure to treat TB, and the diagnosis and treatment is straightforward as diseases go. The only reason that these millions of people continue to suffer from TB is lack of access to treatment, by which I mean money.

So consider, if you would, a hypothetical affirmative plan: "The United States Federal Government should give 10 Billion dollars in foreign aid to governments and NGOs to cure TB." Imagine you are a negative with the most basic negative toolkit: Topicality, Harms, Inherency, Solvency. How do you formulate a strategy against the TB plan?

Well, obviously this case isn't topical under the 2009 resolution, but a re-worded version of it would be very topical under the 2007 resolution, so imagine that it's 2007 and you don't have a serious T argument.

Inherency won't get you very far. The United States gives a large amount of public health assistance, but it's not enough to eradicate TB, and it looks like foreign aid spending will get cut in our current economic malaise.

The Aff has a pretty easy case to make to establish Harms, too. You can't really deny the impact of Tuberculosis, it's death toll is well-documented and it's effects are well-known.

You might be able to chip away at Solvency some. Some of the money will probably be stashed away by corrupt governments, some people have drug-resistant strains, some places don't have the health infrastructure. These takeouts will definitely not be able to negate the entirety of the Aff's solvency claims, though. The simple truth is that you can cure a lot of Tuberculosis with 10 billion big ones. The aff would solve plenty of harm.

So what is a negative to do? Our basic toolbox is clearly insufficient to handle this aff. One of my old coaches gave me this piece of advice when it comes to attacking affs: for all of the things that we aren't doing in the status quo, there is a reason we aren't doing it. Tapping into this reason is usually a pretty decent way to start forming a negative strategy. And of course, the reason we aren't spending 10 Billion dollars on TB in the status quo is that 10 Billion Dollars is a lot of money. If we just dumped 10 Billion dollars with no real source of funding and no chance of getting it back, we could very well pull the plug on our barely-breathing economy. We might even kill more people than we save.

In the real world, problems don't exist in a vacuum, waiting to be solved. Government influences complex systems by means of blunt instruments, so sometimes a well-intentioned idea causes more problems than it solves. As a negative, pointing out the unintended consequences of plan can be a powerful strategy. These arguments are called "Disadvantages," ususally shortened to Disad.

Like an affirmative plan, Disads are usually presented in a few different components.

The Impact is actually the end of a disad's story, but it's the easiest to explain. An impact is "Something Bad Happens." The Economy Crashes, Disease overtakes the world, A civil war erupts into a world war. Pretty much anyhting that can be a Harm can also be an Impact, with one important difference: Harms are happening (or will happen) in the status quo. To win a Disad, the Neg must win that it's impact is not going to happen in the status quo.

This is Uniqueness, whether or not a disad is "unique" to the aff's plan. It's a bit of an akward name, but an important concept. After all, if the war is going to start anyway, then it ceases to be an argument against plan.

The most important argument that the Neg needs to win a disad, though is the Link, the argument that the aff's plan will cause the impact. A link argument usually describes a chain of events, like a bunch of dominoes all standing in a row. Plan knocks over the first domino, which knocks over the second domino, which spends too much of the governments money, which means we need to raise taxes, which means the US economy will fall into a depression, which means the world economy will fall into a depression, which will cause another world war just like the Great Depression caused World War 2. Millions of people will die.

Of course, for the negative to win a disad, they have to win all of those links. If the aff wins that this additional spending will not crash the economy, they don't have to contend with the prospect of World War 3. This is why, as a negative, you make your disads rely on as few links as possible, and as the affirmative you want to be prepared to seek out the weak link in the chain and defeat it with better evidence.

There are other ways that the aff can defend plan against a disad as well, but that list is long enough to warrant it's own article. One additional consideration that I'll fit in here, though, is that just winning the existence of a disadvantage is not enough for the neg to win. If the aff's harm is proven worse than the disad's impact, then there's still a good reason to do plan. If we can save a million people with plan, a disad impact of "Ryan gets a headache" is not a reason to vote neg.

Hammers, Screwdrivers, and The Stock Issues

I'm no expert on debate history, but I think that one of the driving
forces behind innovations in debate is one simple reality: it's darn
tough to be a negative. Those pesky affirmatives get all the time in
the world to craft their 1ACs, and us negatives only get a few
precious moments of prep time to cobble together a round winning
strategy. Living here in the real world also makes the prospect of
defending the status quo pretty tricky. The one thing that every
political ideology seems to agree on is that the world isn't all
puppies and rainbows right now.

Which is why the debate community has crafted quite an extensive
toolkit for the negative through the years. The problem is, learning
this entire toolkit all at once is overwhelming, you need to use a
hammer for a little while to really appreciate the reason for the nail
gun. The most basic negative toolbox has 4 tools, which are the four
stock issues that the affirmative needs to prove to win the round.
Topicality is a big enough subject for it's own article, so I'll focus
here on Inherency, Harms, and Solvency.

There are two different strategies for attacking an Affirmative's
harms scenario, which inolve two concepts that re-occur quite a bit in
the debate universe: takeouts and turns. Takeouts are
arguments that mitigate the impact of a harm. They might reduce the
size of the harm ("Fewer people in poverty die of starvation
than the affirmative claims"), lessen the probability of the
harm ("The affirmative says that a war with Russia is likely if we
don't act, but Russia knows that they would lose this war so they'd
never attack us"), or lengthen the timeframe ("They say that
the world will run out of oil in 2025, but we prove that we have until
at least 2100, which means we'll be able to come up with new
technology in the meantime").

Takeouts implicitly assume that the "bad thing" that the affirmative
describes actually is a bad thing. Turns take the opposite approach.
As it turns out, there is some debate amongst smart people over
whether some things are good or bad. Take Free Trade, for instance.
Some economists argue that free trade around the world is the best way
to grow the economy and prevent war. Other economists argue that we
are better off protecting our domestic industry by restricting free
trade. This means that if the affirmative's harms story centers on
free trade, as the neg we have the option of arguing the other way.
They say trade good, we say trade bad, or vice versa. This is a tough
strategy to do right, but it can be a powerful tool. Teams might not
take time to prepare for arguments like "pollution good," and we can
use that to our advantage.

Inherency, you'll remember, asks the question "If plan didn't
happen, would the harms continue." One of your options as a Negative
is to answer this question with "no." If the neg is going to win on
inherency, they have to prove either than (1) the Aff's plan is going
to happen in the status quo or (2) something else in the status quo
will solve the harm. Proving that plan will happen in the status quo
is tough to do, mostly because aff's tend to pick plans that aren't
being done. However, if you can catch a team unawares by finding their
plan buried in an omnibus spending bill, you've got a pretty easy road
to victory. If the aff's plan itself isn't going to happen in the
status quo, you can occasionally find something else in the status quo
that is going to solve. This also has limited potential, however. At
the end of the day its pretty easy to find some harm out there that
the powers-that-be aren't doing enough about.

Fortunately for the negative, it's much harder to fix problems than it
is to find them, so there's usually an argument to be made over
Solvency. Just like harms, we can attack solvency with takeouts
(plan won't have the intended effect) and/or turns (plan will have the
opposite effect). In those two categories, there are some re-occuring
patterns in successful solvency arguments. Does the plan solve part of
the harm but not all of it? Does the plan make the problem better now
but worse in the long term? Lots of things have to happen for the plan
to solve - are they missing evidence that, say, people will actually
take the social service offered to them? Are the aff's solvency cards
based on faulty predictions, bad science, or biased experts? There have
been more than a few Neg rounds won by finding a part of Solvency that
the Aff takes for granted and exploiting their lack of evidence.

Now, it's important to mention that as the neg, all of the stock issues are
options you have, not requirements. The aff has to prove the entirety of their case by defending the stock issues, but aside from a few exceptions that I'll mention later, the neg has the luxury of picking and choosing. Maybe you want to run your best solvency turns along with some harms takeouts. Maybe you can concede solvency and turn harms. Maybe you want to go all in on inherency. Now, knowing which issues to pick and choose is a more complicated question, but remember that as the negative you have the power to focus the debate on the issues that you think you can win. And if you win, say, that plan doesn't solve, it probably doesn't matter if the aff wins that their harms are really big.

It won't take long for you to learn the limitations of these tools, but they are important tools nonetheless. It's also important to note that this is about the point where you are ready to actually have a debate in the standard policy format, which I recommend you do, actually.

Writing the rules: Arguing topicality

Human beings, by and large, are terrible at staying on topic. When you sit around with your friends, someone brings up the Presidential race, so then you talk about politics for a while. Someone mentions that he caught Obama's speech on the TV at the campus coffee shop, which reminds someone else of how she just discovered how awesome their mocha lattes are, which causes you to chime in about how you can't afford lattes anymore and you make your own coffee at home. Suddenly you're debating the relative merits of French Press v. Coffee Maker, when you started by debating Obama v. McCain.

And there's nothing wrong with that. It's in our nature to make connections, and it's fun to let a conversation wander between friends. However, what if we had to pick a winner and loser out of this debate? How do you care my argument about a french press leaving in the essential oils stack up against your point about the cost to businesses of Obama's cap and trade policy? Or, if we had agreed ahead of time to debate coffee makers, would it be fair if my opponent's 1AC talked about how awesome her cast iron teapot was?

Which is why there is a general rule in policy debate that "the affirmative's plan must adhere to the topic." But how do we determine whether or not a plan is on-topic, or in debatespeak whether it is "Topical"? For a more concrete example: what is the definition of poverty? The federal government provides one (aka "the poverty line")... do we use that one? What if the aff's plan is to raise the federal poverty line (IE extend our current slate of social services to more people)? That plan extends social services to people not "living in poverty" (by the federal definition, anyway). Does that mean it's non-topical? What if they prove that there are people who can't afford basic necessities even if they live "above the poverty line?"

All of these questions are up for debate. Think about that one for a second, because it's a powerful notion. In a competetive debate, the rules themselves are decided during the round. This is the first example most people encounter of a meta-debate, a debate about debate. There are many types of meta-debates (or theory debates, as they are more commonly called), but Topicality is perhaps the most important.

So how do you argue that the affirmative is non-topical? If you're the negative, there's a general form to follow to make a T argument. First of all, you construct an Interpretation of the resolution. Usually this is done by defining one or more words in the resolution. For the poverty T that I'm constructing, you might define "Poverty" by citing the government, who says that a single person making less than $10830 is "living in poverty."

The next step is to show that the affirmative is in Violation of your interpretation. For this plan, the violation argument is fairly straightforward. Raising the poverty line increases social services only to people who aren't living in poverty by the current definition.

Occasionally the violation argument is somewhat more complicated. For example, what if the Affirmative's plan does something topical, and something not-topical, for example: increase medicaid benefits globally, and also extend them to people above the poverty line. This might be an example of "Extra Topicality," or a plan that takes action in addition to a topical action.

Or perhaps the affirmative is only topical after considering the "effects" of plan. For example, the government could institute price controls on prescription medicine, which would mean that Medicaid recipients could buy more treatment at the same price, effectively a social service. This might be an example of "Effects Topicality," where a plan meets the topic only though a chain of events.

Both of these debates (Effects and Extra T) have some additional nuance to them, but I want to introduce the terms here.

The next part of a Topicality frontline (What you would read in a 1NC) is a set of Standards that defend your interpretation. Think of this as "reasons your interpretation is better than any possible aff interpretation." There are a bunch of different arguments you can use to show why your interpretation of the Topic is a good one, but they fall into a few general categories:

The Limits that an interpretation puts on the resolution are important. A looser interpretation of the resolution will allow more cases to be topical, meaning that the neg will have more cases that it needs to prepare against. A too-big topic would make life pretty hard for the negative; they would just have too much work to do to get ready for all the different aff cases. On the other hand, a too-small topic would get boring pretty fast, and the aff would have no chance to take advantage of their unlimited prep time.

But it's not just the raw size of the topic that's important. Ideally there should be a certain unifying theme to the affirmative's arguments, a "direction." We generally use the metaphor of Ground. Imagine we're about to have a snowball fight, your friends versus my friends. Before we start throwing snowballs we stomp a little line through the front yard. You point to one side and say "that's our side!" your team builds up some barricades on your side, my team builds up a little snow fort on my side. Then when we start our snowball fight, everyone knows what's going on. Duck behind this wall to take cover, throw snowballs over in that direction, watch out for snowballs coming from over there.

You might end up with some snow in the face, but everyone knows what's going on. Our game has some organization. If there wasn't a clear division between "my side" and "your side," it'd be chaos. We'd be throwing snowballs at our own teammates, nobody would know where to take cover, and someone would probably end up punching somebody in the face. Such is the case in debate. That clear division of ground is necessary to preserve the organization of the round. The negative (and the negative alone) ought to be able to advocate reducing social services for people living in poverty, for instance.

The Source of an interpretation also is somewhat important. There are some arguments for and against legal definitions, dictionary definitions, definitions from expert in the field, etc, but far more important is that a definition have intent to define. If I say that "During my years in college living in poverty, I consumed truckloads of Ramen," I don't actually intend to define poverty as including all college students. I'm using the word for effect, not in an earnest attempt to determine what is poverty and what is not.

So you've proven that the aff's plan doesn't meet the best interpretation of the resolution... what now? What should the judge do with that information? If you're the neg, you want Topicality to be a Voting Issue. In other words, you want to tell the judge "if we win Topicality, we win the round, regardless of other issues." There are a bunch of reasons that T ought be a voting issue, but there are two concepts that capture most of the reasons. Allowing the aff to run non-topical cases is a violation of fairness, and the only way to preserve the education value of the round is to have some focus on a topic. There's a lot to say about fairness and education as their own subjects, but those are the most important reasons that T should be a voter.

T is probably the most technical subject that new debaters have to learn right away, but don't be intimidated. There are some strategic implications that arise from whether or not you get a kick out of T debates, but you don't necessarily need to be a master of meta-debates right away. It's one of those things that you'll have to learn by doing.

Making your case - the Stock Issues

It might not make sense to follow this pattern strictly, but it seems like the best place to start explaining how a debate round works is to talk about what happens in the first speech. So let's start at the beginning. The affirmative speaks first, and in their "First Affirmative Constructive" or 1AC they are tasked with building a case "affirming" the resolution.

There are many different approaches that the affirmative can take to affirm the resolution (especially considering the long history of policy debate), but the vast majority of affirmatives will present a plan. Most high school resolutions are very broad, for example this year's is "The United States federal government should substantially increase social services for persons living in poverty" There's a lot of different different social services the government offers, many different ways for the government to "substantially increase" them, and many different kinds of "persons living in poverty." The aff generally finds it to their advantage to advocate a more specific policy option, and presenting a plan is how to do that.

Let's say I'm the affirmative and I choose the following plan to advocate: "The United States Federal Government should expand Medicaid coverage to all persons meeting the United States federal poverty definition." I haven't thought too hard about the wording, but I'd expect that similar plans will be popular next year. Reading the plan itself won't take me much time, so I'd use the rest of my 8-minute 1AC to build a Prima Facie case. Prima Facie is a latin term borrowed from the legal system which means "on first appearance." Basically a prima facie case is a complete justification for my plan. There are four parts that make a complete affirmative case in policy debate, we call them The Stock Issues: Topicality, Harms, Inherency, Solvency. THIS is a popular pnemonic.

Topicality is whether or not the aff's plan fits under the resolution. The Aff gets to prepare their 1AC ahead of time, meaning they effectively get "infinite prep time." If the Neg came prepared to debate social services for poverty and the Aff's plan was to fund a NASA mission to Mars, it's not very fair to the neg. For my Medicaid plan, however, the aff has a pretty good argument that their plan is topical. I'll describe some of the specifics of how to argue T in a different article, but one important thing to note is that the aff's plan is generally assumed to be topical until the Neg argues otherwise. Most affs don't spend much time arguing T in the 1AC.

The second stock issue is Harms, or the reason why we need plan. This is usually a reason why the Status Quo - more latin, for "the way things are right now" - is bad. There are a bunch of different "harms" that apply to persons living in poverty, but our case would probably focus on a lack of access to health care. You can live "under the poverty line" and still not qualify for Medicaid, especially if you don't have any kids. Many of these people have jobs and able to meet their basic necessities, but would be unable to pay for any type of medical emergency. Something as simple as breaking an arm in a car accident could cause them to spiral into bankruptcy or worse.

Inherency is a little bit trickier, mostly because it has a bit of an archaic name. Inherency is whether or not the harms are "inherent" to the status quo. The way I like to put it is, "If the plan didn't happen, would the harms continue?" As an affirmative, there are two possible attacks I'd need to defend against. First of all, I'd need to make sure that my plan, as written, won't happen on the status quo. If my plan had just passed (or will soon pass) through both houses of congress and was unlikely to be vetoed by the president, I'd have some serious inherency problems. I'd also want to show that no other action being taken in the status quo is likely to solve my harms. For example, if an insurance company were to start a low-cost insurance program targeted people below the poverty line who are uneligible for medicaid, I'd probably want to present some evidence that that program is not likely to succeed.

Solvency tends to be the Stock Issue that attracts the most argument. After all, it's easy to find problems, but generally much harder to solve them. Solvency is whether or not the affirmative's plan will improve the status quo or "solve the harm." My Medicaid plan would solve by offering the government's Medicaid insurance to everyone who makes less than the Federal Poverty Line. This expansion of coverage would reduce preventable disease and lower the bankruptcy rate. If this was a real round, then attaching some data and warrants to those claims would be a priority for my 1AC.

I've got plenty more to say about all of the stock issues, but that serves as an introduction. These are the components of an affirmative case, but they are also the first tools that the negative can use to win the round. If the Negative wins that, say, the Aff's plan doesn't solve (maybe medicaid coverage isn't enough to meet the needs of this demographic), then the neg wins the round.

What is an argument?

I'm worried that by starting with this topic that I'm going to scare everyone away or bore them to sleep. Someone once told me a story about some intro to philosophy class they took in college; the first thing the professor does is places a stool on the table and asks "What is a stool? What is it about this thing that makes it a stool?" The rest of the lecture involves discussing this stool and its stoolishness.

Yuck. I promise I'm not going to do that. trust me. It's going to seem like I'm doing that, but what I'm really doing is giving you a big bucket of Legos. You remember discovering Legos, right? They're so simple, so mundane, and yet once you wrap your head around the ways they fit together you can create amazing things.

In debate, our legos are called "arguments." I don't mean "argument" like "I got in an argument with my mom when she discovered my stash of Eminem CDs," but a somewhat more technical meaning of the term. So what is an argument?

The way that debaters define and talk about arguments is borrowed from the work of a Mr. Stephen Toulmin, who I usually introduce as "A British Dead Guy," which, as I recently learned, is inaccurate, as he is actually quite alive.

Anyway, Toulmin's model of argument starts with a Claim. This is the thing being argued, the thing that I am trying to persuade you of. "The Sky is Blue" is a claim. "Barack Obama is a United States citizen" is a claim. "Stephen Toulmin is alive" is a claim.

It's a concept that's easy to illustrate, because I can claim pretty much anything. Note, however, that a claim is not an argument all by itself. You might agree with me that Obama is a US citizen, but I haven't created an argument until I provide some reason that Obama is a citizen.

But if I tell you "Barack Obama is a United States citizen, he was born in Hawaii," now I've done more than make a claim. I've also given you data - "He was born in Hawaii." This particular piece of data is pretty easily verifiable. There is a physical record of Barack's birth in the form of a birth certificate. You could go to Hawaii and inspect this document yourself if you were so inclined. You'll find that most (but not all) data is something that can be verified - statistics, studies, observations, and other things we can see and hear.

The third part of an argument is a Warrant, which is implied in the argument above, as it is in many shorter arguments. If I wanted to be more explicit, I could say "Barack Obama is a United States citizen, he was born in Hawaii. According to the US constitution, anyone born in a US state (like Hawaii) is a Citizen." The Warrant is what connects the claim to the data. Put another way, it answers the question "Why does this data prove this claim?"

Warrants are very important in debate, as I'm sure you're aware that one can use the same piece of data to prove contradictory claims. In the race between two arguments - "The economy will improve next year, interest rates are up" and "The economy will get worse next year, interest rates are up" - it is the argument with the better warrant that will win the day.

Okay, enough theory. Claim, Data, Warrant. You've got your Legos. And yes, for you pedants out there, I am aware that the plural of LEGO is LEGO and you should always type it in all caps. Sheesh.